Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the worldwide educational system with an extraordinary disruptive force: schools and universities all around the globe were suddenly forced to close while the academic lecture series of the semester were well underway. The whole didactics had to be switched to remote modalities.

In a climate in which very little time was yielded to adapt to the new situation, it would have been quite difficult to provide the very same setting that it would been available if the courses had been prepared with a proper advance (Hodges et al., 2020). This required to develop the better trade-off between the needs of resuming to teach as soon as possible, and the sake of giving students ways and means to learn as efficiently as if they were attending the originally planned course.

Nevertheless, the use of a Digital Learning Environment (DLE) which allows to adopt methodologies such as formative assessment and new technologies like an Advanced Computing Environment (ACE), and an Automated Assessment System (AAS), was helpful in achieving a, first, efficient transition. It already proved to be effective both at school (Barana et al. 2020) and at university (Marchisio et al. 2020), not only during an emergency.

In this paper we discuss how it is possible to provide a resilient support for the teachers, given a situation in which a considerable amount of uncertainty in the next and mid-term future holds, and how to organize didactics in terms of modalities and design. Indeed, although now every stakeholder is alerted about the possibility of changes at a short notice, it is still not completely clear how these changes could occur, because of a strong dependence on the epidemiological circumstances. The analysis concerns the impact of this sudden transition inside three Bachelors’ and three Masters’ Degrees of our University.

We analyze some questionnaires, aimed at surveying teachers’ perceptions in relation with support interventions, focusing on satisfaction, critical issues, needs, and suggestions. Moreover, we discuss how teachers used the DLE with all its components, and how they organized the resources and the activities with students. The DLE with the methodologies and the new technologies presented resulted crucial in providing a resilient support.

References:
[1] Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., and Bond, A. (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning, accessed 16 July 2020.
[2] Barana, A., Fissore, C., Marchisio, M., and Roman, F. (2020). “Enhancement of Mathematical Problem Solving by Discussing and Collaborating Asynchronously,” in Proceedings of 12th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN20), in press.
[3] Marchisio, M., Remogna, S., Roman, F., and Sacchet, M. (2020). “Teaching Mathematics in Scientific Bachelor Degrees Using a Blended Approach,” in Proceedings of IEEE 44th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC2020), 190-195.

Keywords:

Digital Learning Environment, Distance Learning, Remote Learning, Teacher Support, Teacher Training.