During the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems around the world transitioned to emergency remote teaching (ERT) to continue teaching, learning, assessment and communication with students (Hodges et al., 2020). Technology has always been considered an integral component of online learning, as teachers and students alike use digital platforms for synchronous and asynchronous communication. Students are referred to a variety of rich, up-to-date websites and interact with the content, promoting active participation and encouraging online dialogue (Shamir Inbal & Blau, 2021a). As such, technology was expected to fulfill a similar role in ERT. However, it is important to distinguish between Online Learning that has been designed and researched over the past decades with ERT - a temporary shift to distant learning due to a crisis (Hodges et. al, 2020). As time goes on, the threat of the pandemic continues and schools are now quicker to transition to online learning in situations when previously, learning would have been cancelled (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020). Following this, it is expected that ERT will gradually transform into routine online learning (Lockee, 2021; Shamir-Inbal & Blau, 2021a) and therefore, the quality of the students' distant learning experience should be assessed and improved.

An important distinction between the interactions in face-to-face classroom and online learning sessions can be explained in terms of the Media Naturalness Theory (Kock, 2005). This theory ranks the naturalness of the media according to criteria of co-location, synchronicity of communication, identification of facial expression and body language, and naturalness of speech. When media naturalness is low, social cues are poorly transmitted and student cognitive load is high. Thus, online learning is characterized by lower outcomes and medium student satisfaction (Blau et al., 2017).

Initially, ERT student challenges focus on technical and autonomous learning skills (Chiu, 2020; Shamir-Inbal & Blau, 2021a). However, as the online learning progressed, it became clear that the lack of emotional attachment to teachers and peers was at the core of distant learning challenges (Chiu, 2020).

The transition to distance learning presented not only the teachers with new opportunities and challenges, but also the students and parents. Parental involvement was critical among the younger students to maintain learning (Misirli & Ergulec, 2021; Yang et al., 2021) as younger students were unable to connect to lessons online, follow a timetable and keep track of the learning. Throughout the ERT, parents took the place of teachers, providing emotional, organizational and academic assistance to their children. Previous studies found that parental support is critical to the success of young students' online learning, especially during emergencies (Shamir-Inbal, & Blau, 2021b). Consequently, it is necessary that in ERT, teachers cooperate with parents and develop effective means of communication with parents and students alike (Bubb & Jones, 2020; Shamir-Inbal & Blau, 2021a). In order to fully understand the students' experience, it is best to examine the perspectives of all the stakeholders involved – teachers, students and parents. A number of research initiatives focused on the students’ experience through the perspective of school practitioners and parents (Yang et al., 2021; Shamir-Inbal & Blau, 2021a,), though, fewer studies explored the unique point of view of young students (Fis Erumit, 2021; Manca & Delfino, 2021).

This study expanded on previous research examining teachers’ opportunities and challenges in ERT (Shamir-Inbal, & Blau, 2021b) adding the student and parent perspectives. The goal of the current study was to characterize online teaching-learning experiences during the Covid-19 ERT in grades 1-6 in elementary schools in Israel.

The study examined the following research question: What are the perspectives of teachers, students and parents on the elementary student’s learning experience during emergency distant learning?

This study was conducted within the mixed-method research paradigm, combining the qualitative approach that allows an in-depth examination of an investigated phenomena and the quantitative approach that allow exploration of the differences between groups of participants. Participants: The participants included 22 elementary homeroom teachers (11 teachers of grades 1-3 and 11 teachers of grades 4-6), 21 students (11 students in grades 1-3 and 10 students in grades 4-6), and, finally, 11 parents of students in grades 1-3. Instruments: In order to receive a broad and in-depth perspective of the perceptions and considerations in integrating technology in ERT, semi-structured interviews were conducted with all the participants. During the interviews, the participants were asked to describe students' ability to cope with distant learning tasks, to detail difficulties they encountered and explain how they faced these challenges. The interviews with the teachers lasted about 60 minutes and with the students and parents about 30-40 minutes. The interviews with the 1st-3rd graders were conducted together with their parents, while 4th-6th graders were interviewed alone. Triangulation between the data from the interviews conducted with teachers, students and parents made it possible to crosscheck the perspectives of different stakeholders in the context of this investigated phenomenon, in order to strengthen the validity of the qualitative findings. In addition, the research analyzed actual online learning activities described by the teachers- in order to fully understand how the challenges and opportunities described by the participants affect pedagogical design. This analysis of learning activities served for triangulation of the participants’ perspectives with actual teaching-learning processes in ERT. Procedure: The statements collected in the interviews were analyzed according to the opportunities and challenges that arose from experiencing ERT learning and how students, teachers and parents who participated in this study perceived them. To test the inter-rater reliability, 25% of the statements were coded by two researchers who specialize in learning technologies, and a high level of agreement was found between the raters (Cohen's Kappa = 0.84). In order to examine the significance of the differences in the number of statements observed in each group according to their frequency in the study, we ran a Chi-Square goodness of fit test between teachers, students and parents (separately for grades 1-3 and grades 4-6). This statistical test took into account the total number of statements in each sub-category and the respective study groups.

The three different participant perspectives afforded a comprehensive picture of the opportunities and challenges in the distant learning (Bubb & Jones, 2020), but each group perceived it in a different manner. Interestingly, teachers could identify only student challenges but no opportunities. Students, on the other hand, reported similar numbers of opportunities and challenges, and the parents mentioned significantly more opportunities than challenges. The discrepancy between the groups can be interpreted as such that the teachers, being physically separated from the students, were mainly aware of the challenges the separation entailed. The students and parents, on the other hand, who experienced the distant learning up-close were in a better place to assess both the opportunities and the challenges. In the sub-category of difficulty in "exposure and self-participation" there was full agreement among all groups of participants. Likewise, all three groups reported strong feelings of student dysfunction and lack of connection, as well as difficulty in understanding lesson content, which was expected due to the lower level of media naturalness (Kock, 2005). The parents and students claimed that the remote learning developed a strong sense of student independence, responsibility and autonomy in the learning, although the teachers did not mention this. Students in both age groups complained about the lack of social communication and peer learning. However, this was not reflected among teachers and was very rarely mentioned by parents. Teachers and parents may not have been aware of the lack of social and academic-social contact for students. One of the major opportunities that both the students and parents cited was the teachers’ availability to answer questions and assist with learning. Teachers’ efforts to deal with the challenge of students' lack of physical contact were much appreciated by both students and parents (Bubb & Jones, 2020).

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