Background: After the mandated closure and reopening of schools during and after the coronavirus pandemic, online synchronous teaching and learning has emerged as an opportunity to expand the reach of K-12 education, however, there is a lack of understanding about the characteristics of the successful learning experiences during that period that could be transferred to the present. Therefore, students' experiences during that period constitute an opportunity to learn about the teaching strategies that enabled positive learning experiences under such conditions. Objectives: Understand the experience of high-school students during online classes and characterise the strategies that enabled positive learning perceptions. Methods: Ten high-school students were selected and asked to describe positive and negative episodes during online synchronous classes using a narrative research technique. Based on the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework, each presence (cognitive, social, and teaching) and its categories were investigated. The way that students experienced remote learning was defined using targeted content-analysis techniques. Results and Conclusions: The results show that students reported experiences in which cognitive, social and teaching presences from the original framework emerge, as well as learning and emotional presence, highlighting the key relevance of teaching presence in articulating the activities as well as the other presences. Also, they highlight the relevance of the structure, content and tone of the classes, the need to develop teachers' socio-emotional knowledge and pedagogy, and their awareness and active consideration of the emotional consequences of their instructional strategies.