Professional competences of pre-service teachers: from the F2F to the online learning programme

The COVID-19 pandemic has created significant challenges for the global higher education community: it has required faculty and students to respond to an unprecedented challenge and to shift suddenly from traditional face-to-face curriculum to distance learning formats through virtual classrooms. Some learning programmes, such as the TFA, had a strong theoretical-practical characterisation and were therefore delimited by regulations requiring full in-presence (F2F) and compulsory attendance. Due to the pandemic, the one-year teaching-learning programme for support teachers (TFA) followed the same path and was redesigned by universities for distance education. The re-design at the University of Macerata was based on pedagogical assumptions: technology was intended as a support to achieve learning outcomes. Our study aims to investigate perceptions of the theoretical and practical skills acquired from the F2F and the online format, considering a group of students enrolled for different school orders who followed both the current online programme and the previous years’ F2F programme