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Top1. Introduction
The need to stay at home due to the coronavirus pandemic has changed educational systems, which have had to design strategies for academic activities at home: online education, also called “virtuality.” The term “virtuality” comes from ancient times. The etymology of the word dates from 1483. It defines a person endowed with virtue or power, as an intangible concept, emerged in the mid-17th century (Bennett et al., 2005). Later on, virtuality can be referenced through correspondence education in England, when Issac Pitman started a short course in 1840 (Mahnegar, 2012). Surely, receiving a letter through this service involved certain emotions. In the 1980s virtuality became a common term. It was adapted by the computer revolution coming to mean something that makes itself appear or exist through technology (Gilmore & Warren, 2007). When people use screens, “faces are rich in information about individual identity, and also about mood and mental state” (Sathik & Jonathan, 2013, p. 2). The transfer of knowledge or skills using the global network as a distribution channel changes the teaching-learning process to a constructivist approach (Kumar et al., 2001).
Virtuality is just one more way to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and a challenge for academia. The process goes beyond adapting everything to offer a virtual campus. It is about training the student to take responsibility for the personal disposition that entails cognition: the need to learn and to “appropriate” the attitude from the emotional plexus of who receives the knowledge, and who teaches. The demand for virtuality for the academy implies advancing the forefront of the changes triggered by evolution in the cognitive, technological, and emotional growth of today's students.
Generally private universities have undertaken virtual education, making them more efficient and sustainable in global times. For instance, the California Virtual University offers about 700 courses online although no degrees. Online education has become a golden industry with the expectation of growing (Kumar et al., 2001), and it keeps growing and gaining popularity (Qiu, 2019). From a sample of 538 surveys of university students, Selim (2007) identifies four factors in this process: instructor, student, information technology, and college support. All of these must be taken into account when developing or implementing courses based on e-learning. However, it does not take account the emotional aspect.
Facial expressions are the main source of information, along with words, to determine the internal feelings of students (Sathik & Jonathan, 2013). Currently, there is a challenge that appeals to the emotional resilience of those who must face virtuality in public universities. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Koçoğlu and Tekdal (2020) analyzed the opinions of professors from public universities in Turkey. They identified that online learning interaction improves the participation of parents in the education process.
Following this idea, Pekrun et al., (2007) argue that most learning-related emotions are considered achievement emotions. Nevertheless, in the particular case of switching from a traditional model to an online one, it is worth paying attention to the students’ emotional perceptions. With the pandemic being a unique experience, we associate virtuality as a change of moods that modify the flow state of students by impacting academic performance (Goleman, 2000).