Digital learning and virtual educational relationship. An empirical study on the effectiveness of audio-video systems in the on-line teaching for high school and university

Abstract

This paper examines the role of cognitive, affective and relational components in online teaching to facilitate the learning and qualify the educational relationship that can be established to a virtual level.
Components such as the positive emotional involvement may appropriately be increased through the education technologies (ICT), which enable to expand the personal ability to teach, providing a greater experience of interpersonal contact, something that more needs to be reinforced and promoted in training online.
As part of an empirical investigation conducted to verify the effectiveness of audio-video systems in on-line learning, it has been made a movie by mounting various clips from the relevant film work, classic or newer, for a total of 30 minutes. It was evaluated the level of learning by counting the learning of the concepts learned and remembered after watching the instructional video by 160 university students of courses of pedagogical and psychological disciplines.
In line with the working hypothesis, the results confirm the existence of a positive correlation between learning and positive emotional involvement. Learning is greatly favored by the ability to read their own and others’ emotions, being emotionally involved in the virtual interpersonal perception and to maintain a good emotional self-control.
These results can be taken into account for setting up experiential laboratories to promote - through the development of positive emotional involvement and expressive sensitivity - better levels of learning in the use of materials and subject content offered in the curricula of secondary schools and higher university courses.