Abstract:

COVID-19 brought with itself disruptions and shortcomings, which negatively affected the ability of educational institutions to provide a fair and equitable access to educational services. This is especially true as far as disadvantaged groups are concerned, including people living in rural areas and those suffering from economic and social deprivation. In Italy, The National Operating Programme 2014-2020 “For School - skills and learning environments” (hereinafter, NOP “For School”) acknowledged these challenges and introduced several calls intended to support the schools’ efforts to contextualize in the digital environment their educational offering. However, school managers and teachers are generally unaware of the call launched by the NOP “For School” to modernize the Italian educational system. Moreover, when they are aware of these opportunities, they usually lack the skills and the competencies to submit successful applications to the calls. To deal with this situation, the Italian National Institute for Documentation, Innovation, and Educational Research – in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Education – introduced the Distance Learning (in Italian: “Formazione a Distanza” – FaD) special programme. FaD is targeted to the whole Italian population of school managers and teachers. It aims at providing users with the information and competencies that are required to effectively surf the web-based platform which is implemented to assist school managers and teachers to propose applications for financing and to manage accepted applications. More specifically, FaD intends to sustain the ability of Italian schools to launch innovative programmes and to enhance their educational potential, exploiting the additional resources which are allocated by the NOP “For School”. Interestingly, the shortcomings produced by COVID-19 seemed to encourage the participation of school managers and teachers to the FaD. In particular, at the end of July 2020, about 75,000 access to the FaD platform were recorded. More than 320,000 training sessions were delivered to 24,000 users. In sum, more than 80,000 hours of distance-learning activities were provided to users who represented about 7,000 educational institutions in the Country. Users downloaded more than 145,000 educational materials and the webinars which were launched attracted more than 15,500 users. These data are promising and suggest that the FaD was effective in drawing the attention of school managers and teachers throughout Italy. This study aims at providing an in-depth investigation of the FaD experience, sticking to a learning analytics approach. More specifically, it aims at exploiting th big data which are available through the FaD platform and to shed light on the contribution that the NOP “For School”, via the encouraging action of the FaD program – had on the enhancement of the quality and effectiveness of educational services.

Keywords:

Education, Inclusion, Distance Learning, Learning Analytics.