New information and communication technologies (NICT) offer teachers new ways to align teaching styles with the learning styles of the “Virtual Generation” (Proserpio and Gioia, 2007), an alignment that arguably enables optimal teaching and learning (Gioia and Brass, 1986). In this respect, teachers can now rely on many different technological tools to help the students to learn, both during and outside traditional courses such as blogs, forums, audio and video podcasts, etc. We assume that these tools support the delivery of a global teaching and learning experience co-created by both the teacher and the students (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004), as they facilitate the development of what Ramsey and Couch (1994) called a partnership model of teaching and learning. This is supposed to reinforce and enhance the substance of the relationship between the aforementioned actors. Yet, we try and go further than these authors standpoint, since we aim at showing that the use of NICT also contributes to the emergence of new kinds of relationships between the students themselves which, on their turn, impact the teacher-students relationship. In other words, the use of NICT influences both directly and indirectly the substance of the relationship between a teacher and his students. Hence, we develop a model of what we call "the co-creation of a multichannel experience of teaching and learning". The main characteristics of this model are : first, the heavy resort to both synchronous and asynchronous information and communication technologies complementary to on-site courses; secondly, a strong implication of the students in their learning path; thirdly, a strong implication of the teacher who must not consider that technology will "do the job" for him, as far as relationship building with the students is concerned (in other words, technology is just a means to build the relationship, but is not the relationships in itself). The use of multiple channels by the teacher to deliver his message to the students is hypothesized to enhance the perception of the latter about both the course content and the nature of the relationship with the teacher. It is also hypothesized to make the students want to be more implicated in learning, and to develop collaborative behaviors, the intensity of which depends on the nature of the technological tools they have at their disposal.

It is an empirical experiment on young students entering a Business School right after secondary school, realized by teachers used to traditional techniques who decided to integrate NICT in their teaching, methods. The methodology is quantitative, as we used a survey distributed to more than 200 students after they had followed a course that used the tools described before. The data analysis is still under progress (results below are from preliminary analysis).

This article demonstrates that these new technologies enable to develop what we called the co-creation of a multichannel perspective of both teaching and learning. Our results show that using both synchronous and asynchronous ways of teaching and learning enable the students to have a deeper understanding of the topic, as well as a closer relationship with their teacher. Yet, it would seem that, contrary to our expectations, NICT do not create new kinds of relationships between the students, meaning that the partnership model may remain limited to teachers-students interactions. This study also opens interesting perspectives about both the nature of the tools that can be used in such a perspective, and the ways these tools ought to be implemented.