While the Covid crisis showed that it was possible, under certain conditions, to teach and learn at a distance under good conditions in higher education (Nambiar, 2020; Opanasenko and Novikova, 2023), it now seems difficult, once the crisis has passed, to get this teaching method accepted in any INSPEs. Although technical facilities, funding and volunteer teachers exist, institutional obstacles are preventing this teaching method from being introduced, even on the margins of the rest of the curriculum. The ’school form’ (Vincent, Lahire and Thin, 1994) is resisting, surrounded as it is by doubts about trainers and trainees, about the possibility that they might not be doing what they should be doing, about the seriousness of such a system, and about the difficulty of monitoring each other’s bodies for want of being able to monitor their cognitive activity. This situation is all the more paradoxical given that, at the same time, the French Ministry of Education is asking its future teachers to ”integrate the elements of digital culture necessary for the exercise of their profession” by making ”effective use of technologies for exchange and training” (BOEN, 2013). The aim of this paper is to give an account of the experience of two teacher-researchers, one in Educational and Training Sciences, the other in Anthropology, who wanted to be able to do some of their university teaching at a distance but were prevented from doing so, by mobilising the theoretical framework of the French ergonomic school (Leplat, 1983) based on the distinction it makes between task and activity (Vinatier and Pastr´e, 2007) and what it calls the reality of activity (Clot, 2008), in this case the effects of these institutional obstacles which prevent the emergence of new forms of schooling in initial teacher training and new learning methods for them.