Are Special Needs Only for Special Students? A Few Lessons Learnt from a year of Very Special Distance Learning

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced, in the last year, the widest school shutdown in the recent history, and the largest Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) experiment in the human history as well. Unfortunately, most educational institutions and their students were not adequately prepared to such a swift change to remote teaching and the obtained results were not always positive. In view of building upon such an extraordinary experiment, and improving over the current limitations of technology and approaches, this paper proposes some lessons learnt from a year of research and development in the areas of emergency remote teaching and remote cognitive rehabilitation for cognitively impaired students. The principal contribution of the paper is that most of the described findings hold as well for normally developing students and therefore may be exploited to integrate and improve the current remote teaching technologies.