We still don't know if and how the universities will reopen the academic year in attendance after the summer.
There is a lot of talk about increasing resources for the right to study and the development of digital infrastructures, but the impression is that underneath there is very little reality, also because the economic crisis triggered by the lockdown will certainly decrease enrollments, effectively limiting the investment opportunities of the universities.
Driven by the emergency, the e-learning solution has naturally emerged as a viable solution to maintaining the spread of higher education, but teach distance it is an activity that requires organization and specific professional skills, often still not present within many universities.
Of course with the exclusion of the 11 (few) telematic universities present in Italy.
The necessary premise is that university teachers do not like to take their lessons online. They often have difficulty mastering the tools, and not being used to the lack of contact, do not know how to manage the transition of their teaching method from offline to online.
But also students, who moreover perceive these difficulties of teachers, tend to suffer from the lack of university in its classical formula, which is made up above all of "physical" interactions and community.
Precisely for this reason, the choice to offer, even partially, e-learning teaching requires - in addition, of course, to the sine quaefficiency of the technological structure - even one rigorous methodology e specific, as well as the ability to measure the effectiveness of teaching and defining the result achieved.
It is not enough for every student and every teacher to have an electronic device (PC, tablet, smartphone) and an Internet connection. And this condition should not be taken for granted.
If a university wants to offer e-learning courses, it must be able to respect a precise set of rules, such as:
- equip yourself with interactive tools such as virtual classroomsbut also to organize chat and use i social media, which stimulate discussion and collaboration between students;
- train their own teachers on the use of these tools, but also and above all on the specific methodologies of distance learning, which by its nature is an interactive teaching;
- make available a large team of specialists at support (Tutor, Mentor, Coach, ...);
- organize the recording of the lessons, making them available in streaming at any time;
- allow the construction of personalized study paths;
- define and guarantee the methods ofonline exam.
And university teachers must necessarily be able to:
- rethink your own way didactics;
- reconvert i materials of reference;
- change the times and the rhythmics lessons;
- adopt different evaluation methods learning;
- look for ways to recover the sense of community of university life.
These are difficult conditions, and certainly not practicable in a short time for those who have not had previous experience in distance learning.
However, for those who like PIAZZA COPERNICO has been working in this field for a very long time, the prospect of a university education that finally manages to understand how to exploit e-learning is extremely tempting.
La e-learning mode, while fully guaranteeing the interaction in the relationship between teacher and learner, by its nature it allows students to benefit from greater flexibility and lower costs (for example, we think of outsiders), and in this sense it can also be an extremely useful factor to overcome the economic and geographical inequalities that often make access to university education difficult.
The student could more easily access the course of higher studies by freeing himself from the conditioning deriving from the location of the training institution, and instead evaluating above all the choices of the training courses, the quality of the teaching provided, the ease of access, the offer of tutoring during the course of study.
in short e-learning - if organized correctly - it could help to make access to tertiary education easier and more democratic, with all the positive repercussions that this would have for the country.