Learning models and problems: being students in pandemic times at Sapienza University of Rome

Italy was the first European country to be affected hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. The total country lockdown, proclaimed by the Italian government from March to May 2020, compelled schools and universities to quickly readjust their education strategies, taking advantage of network and digital technologies opportunities. There have been many difficulties, from the first and second level digital divide to the medium-low percentage of necessary digital skills in the population (as recorded in the European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index Report 2020 - Human Capital). At the level of educational policies, many suggestions were offered about organizing online training paths, keeping interactivity and activating students: UNESCO launched the Global Education Coalition; the European Union proposed several initiatives on digital skills for education (EU-Code Week and The Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition) and encouraged the creative Europeana digital contents reuse as a support for remote teaching. Many criticalities have been found in Italy for the web infrastructure inadequacy and the insufficient teacher preparation in e-learning. Despite it, online courses have been planned in a short time, and the University has also been called upon to test new teaching formulas. In this regard, which were the practices actually ensuring the learning quality? How did students perceive them? Innovative and efficient e-learning paths have been adopted, or have they been limited to a frontal lessons transposition on online video conferencing systems? How deep were the identified gaps in course delivery and learning process? Which aims have transversal skills and collaborative learning, among other things, being addressed to? This paper reviews the results of a questionnaire administered to more than 400 students at the University of Rome La Sapienza (History of Art, Tourism, Communication and Entertainment, Linguistic Mediation) in their second year of attendance in 2020/2021. It reports the learning experiences they had in the second semester of the previous academic year, 2019/20, in the middle of the first pandemic wave. Students were asked to answer questions on seven macro-areas of the survey, evaluating with 4-point Likert scale: the frequency and organization of the didactic delivery, the support given to students by teachers and tutors, the assessment procedures and contents, the technical problems that arose, the transversal skills acquired, the general distance learning impact on individual training. Based on the results, which the main strategies and criticalities emerged from, it is possible to identify useful elements to refine and make online activities more flexible, not only to face the epidemic but to design different teaching and learning methods.