Abstract:

The article refers to the disciplinary didactic lab (DDL) carried out in blended e-learning to obtain the teaching qualification in Business Economics and Administration (BEA) at the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB), during 2003-14.

The design of an adaptive learning environment, where set the DDL aims at creating an interactive and shared system among all the available resources, to meet the new teachers’ professional requirements. Nowadays the teaching values refer to high standards whilst the teaching-learning processes are driven by the rapid changes due of the cultural, technological, sociological and civic challenges.

Starting from these premises, the DDL project is based on an agreement, shared and transparent, that offers contaminations between formal and informal contexts, activating all the available resources to develop constructive interactions in a cognitive extended environment WEB2.0, seamlessly from real to virtual.

A holistic experiential training is suggested for a total involvement, aimed at mobilizing key competencies (KC) and professional (PC) by the action-research method. It is proposed the educational use of ICT to guide the community of practice in authentic teaching situations, focusing on the disciplinary point of view arising from an interdisciplinary problematic context.

As the main goal is to promote the restructuring of the knowledge in a physical and social network, the didactical micro-structure consists in a training-cycle recursive, based on four moments: teamwork, intergroup, systematization, formative assessment. All these can be managed and shared in the presence and on a web-community.

The inductive-deductive process starts from a common experience (case-study/role-playing/simulation, etc.) to arrive to the problem-solving solution through a common shared product. Thus the laboratorial teaching focuses on the integration of the fundamental behavioural dimensions (cognitive, social, technological and methodological).

The intentional and structured integration on a specific complex task, developed in a real and virtual environment, is oriented by three coordinates:
Premise:
Directly linked to the skills and knowledge owned, works as an intellectual stimulus to activity.

Situation:
That outlines the problem, gradually increasing the number of variables and the complexity and is tightly linked to the peculiarity of the case under study.

Working proposal:
It defines the expected result and mobilizes knowledge, capabilities and abilities concerning the case-study.

To enhance the participants’ autonomy in making decisions and improve individual and social responsibility, the training process leads to modelling of concepts, processes and procedures of the discipline. Thus the practices allow connecting the experience with the meaning, the research with the action: the performance balancing consolidates KC and PC and in turn improves students’ ones in view of European Qualifications Framework (EQF). Furthermore this holistic approach minimizes distances and differences both cultural/social and professional/technological.

The coevolution finds its way through continuous feed-back and feed-forward processes. Negotiate the point of views, meanings and models in presence and on web leads to a remarkable change of the cognitive structure of the subject and improves the acquisition and the transfer of a constellation of competencies and skills.

Keywords:

Holistic experiential learning, business economics and administration, community of practices, key competencies and professional, inter-subjective knowledge.