This paper explores how COVID-19 affected the experiences of international students enrolled to UK on-campus universities and how they made sense, navigated and lived out the on-line university as the possible educational alternative put in place during COVID-19. We argue that 'emergency teaching' was normalised as digital education, leading students into a digital trap that constrained to a large extent their educational experience to access of expert knowledge. This curriculum issue is reflective of a lack of digital imagination which is compounded by a scarcity of digital cultural knowledge resulting in misrecognition of digital education as a field in its own right. We conclude that digital education would benefit from being understood as having its own logic of practice and localised within the cultural norms of its field of application: a digital field.