Social presence, synchrony, and personalization: challenges of online education in the post-pandemic university

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a forced transition to the virtuality of face-to-face training proposals from universities. But what happened in those higher education careers that already had a distance modality? What lessons learned does the pandemic leave in the subjects that have already been developed online, mediated by digital technologies? In search of answers to these questions, a paradigmatic case study was completed a distance career with a helping profile, accredited by a private Argentine university2. The research covered two phases exploration and description, arriving at a categorization that dialogues with con-cepts of the theoretical framework. The data obtained reveals the installation of videoconference as a common practice in traditionally asynchronous spaces. The conclusions highlight the relationship of the categories social presence and per-sonalization, with the situation of synchrony associated with presence. Everything seems to indicate that the return to normality does not constitute a return to the previous situation, but rather an opening to a transformative process that conso-lidates synchrony as a common practice in distance learning modality, and that causes -in terms of De Alba (2021)- a structural dislocation whose derivations must be mapped to broaden the understanding of the phenomenon.