A new world is open? Distance teaching in Italian universities during the Covid-19 emergency

The chapter is based on the results of a national survey on distance teaching during the Covid-19 emergency that was carried out in June 2020. The survey was based on an extensive sample of 3,398 members of the teaching faculty at Italy’s state universities. It centers on two main themes. The first is that of the emergency sparked by the pandemic and its spread. The questionnaires made it possible to collect information about the universities’ reaction to the emergency (Section 2), the infrastructures deployed to deal with it, and how they were used (Section 3). Faculty members’ assessment of their experience was positive on the whole (Section 4), though its negative and stressful aspects were clearly apparent from the survey (Section 5). The second theme concerns university teaching methods. The survey made it possible to compare pre- and post-emergency teaching methods (Section 6) as well as to tap respondents’ opinions about the forms teaching will take in the future (Section 7). The conclusions (Section 8) will discuss several positive and negative features of Italian universities that the pandemic crisis brought to light, emphasizing how the crisis has led universities and faculties to call their teaching and its aims and methods into question, along with the use of digital technologies in higher education.