Conceptual Representations of Participation in Synchronous and Asynchronous Digital Education Environments for Vocational Education and Training Students

New critical educational issues arose during the implementation of distance education in the COVID-19 period. One of the most serious was the lack of non-verbal communication between students and teachers during distance education, as the physical contact of teaching was "mediated" by the digital environments of synchronous and asynchronous education. In this paper, we first describe and then take the first steps to fill this gap by designing non-mandatory descriptive methods for distance communication. To achieve this, we use conceptual representations and examine material by the real participation of Vocational Education and Training students in synchronous and asynchronous online environments. We present examples of verbal and non-verbal communication from student participation, using specific online applications, namely Mentimeter.com Hot Potatoes, and Wonder.me. Moreover, through the overall analysis of the issue, we illuminate the dynamic changes in the field of education, both due to the digital transformation of the institutional structures and to the change in attitudes and characteristics of students that result from these transformations.