Online Education, the experience of Upper Secondary Technical Vocational Institute ” F. Scarpellini” situated in Foligno (Italy).
The need of making use of distance learning, as a consequence of the school closure due to the current health emergency for the Coronavirus, caught us unprepared, disorientated, frightened, without any detailed and univocal set of instructions from the Ministry of Public Education. In such situation, the responsibility often lies with the School Manager.

According to MIUR estimates, 82% of the Italian Schools have experienced online learning for the very first time. 

We all started working hard and everyone, even the less experienced, took up the challenge and took action to continue to provide students with the educational activities, being aware that online learning does not have the same strong educational value of the face-to-face activities.   

By online learning we mean a set of training activities that is delivered via the internet to students using their home computers or other device (e.g. tablets, smartphones, audiovisual equipment).

Online learning (also known as FAD) is characterized by:

• interactivity, i.e. the need to involve the learner, generally through learning by doing approach;
• dynamism, i.e. the learner’s need to acquire new specific skills;
• modularity, i.e. the possibility of organizing the contents of a course according to the training objectives and learner’s needs.

Having said that, it is clear that FAD involves abandoning traditional lesson, leaving the curriculum aside, creating new training contents and evaluating students’ performances using new and different types of criteria. We now focus on Learning Units and not by lesson hours. It is necessary to avoid long written essays and replace them with videos or diagrams, maps. We should plan the activities independently from the teaching hours required for the national curriculum. 

In short, a revolution that involves a difficult and fast remodulation. But no one has backed out, all of us, teachers and students, School Manager and all the School Staff is committed to face the emergency and keep working and changing. 

The preparation of our future generations has always been one of the most important challenges of our country and certainly, this experience is going to change education forever, integrating digital content and multimedia approach with traditional methods.