How Videoconferencing and its Affordances Transformed Teaching in Schools During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about major changes in digitization in many areas of life and professions. New areas were digitized almost overnight, the school system in Germany was no exception leading to a demand for videoconferencing tools and communication platforms. These technologies have many different functionalities that need to be discovered, explored, and exploited by the user. Given the disruptive events that the COVID pandemic brought to us, this paper aims to shed light on how the dynamics of discovery, exploration, and exploitation unfolds. We use a functional affordance theory perspective to analyze and understand how user learn to use new technologies. To do this, we conducted an exploratory case-study-based research design including interviews with teachers from various schools to analyze how they appropriate new technologies to develop an explanatory theoretical model.