The Importance of Tacit Knowledge When Teaching Suddenly Online

The COVID-19 outbreak had multiple impacts on our lives. While the overall society has been impacted, teachers and students have not been spared: lockdowns and emergency remote teaching led them to adapt. So that teachers suddenly taught online to transfer knowledge. Besides such an adaptation, one of the challenges has been to keep students motivated and interested to ensure knowledge transfer, even if there were no physical interaction. Human responses are then crucial as answers to these challenges, when individuals are facing such a crisis situation. In this paper, we propose to model teaching mechanisms and how they have been impacted to suddenly go online and ensure knowledge transfer, whether tacit or made-explicit. We focus on the importance of tacit knowledge transfer from the teacher towards the students. Through our proposal we highlight the role of interactions between the teacher and the students and how much informal exchanges are essential to transfer tacit knowledge. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.