When Your Classroom Becomes the Screen. Faculty Relate Their Experiences, Part 2

BY SWITCHING TO DISTANCE LEARNING, BOCCONI WAS CAPABLE OF MAINTAINING THE FLOW OF LEARNING BETWEEN FACULTY AND STUDENTS. HERE ARE THE STORIES OF 23 PROFESSORS INVOLVED

Luca Sintoni, Financial Statements: "I was drawing the structure of some double entry accounts on the computer and, since it wasn't a touch screen, I was using my mouse, with somewhat questionable results. A student, in a chat message, wrote me: 'Professor, you are very good in accounting, but in art... This was the first distant-learning lesson of the course, where we managed to involve about 100 students. I think this teaching method breaks down the social barrier that exists in the classroom, where perhaps some students avoid intervening for fear of being judged by their colleagues ".

Nicoletta Corrocher, Innovation, Growth and Sustainability: "Distance teaching is a great challenge and the current health emergency has given us the opportunity to rise to it, investing ourselves and our communication skills even outside the classroom. The experiment was very successful and made all of us faculty members reflect on the great potential of e-learning, not so much as a substitute for traditional teaching, but as a natural complement to it."

Francesco Saita, Quantitative Finance and Derivatives II: "Although classroom interaction is superior, what we are learning these days will be very useful in the future. I recorded two lessons for the class of Italian-speaking students and two for the international one, with three videos for accompanying each lecture: the support from the colleagues of BUILT, the e-learning lab of the University, was fundamental ".

Stefania Boffano, Tax Law: "I used a series of modules that I had already prepared for an online course. It is an online platform where students initially view an introductory video and then can navigate through infographics and other video clips. What for me it is particularly important that within eah moduleis also a tool with for students's self-evalutation"

Emanuele Lucchini Guastalla, Civil Law and Business Law: "In-person attendance is priceless, but by videotaping the lecture, we avoided losing weeks of study. Certainly, speaking in front of the empty classroom, without receiving any feedback from the audience, was a challenge. It is a bit like when an actor must perform in an empty theater."

Renata Trinca Colonel, SDA Bocconi Master in Fashion and Design Management: “For me it was not really a novelty, since for some time now we have been doing online courses in Master programs. In this case, I prepared four lessons which I should have held in the classroom on Wednesday and Thursday and I instead made available via remote learning on Friday. Since they were supposed to be four lectures in four different days, when I recorded the lectures I wore a different sweater in each, to maintain the illusion...".

Angelo Ditillo, Performance Measurement and Control Systems: "I have rethought the way of presenting case studies, to cope with the lack of interaction you used to get in the classroom. However, since the usability of these digital technologies is very high, you can really think to make a larger use of them in the future, once we'll go back to normal ".

Diego Ubfal, Macroeconomics: "I am using the Collaborate tool, which allows you to program the class within the Blackboard environment, so that students can see it automatically. I plan lectures to occur at the same time as the official course timetable and send an announcement about the upcoming class. When the session starts, I share my screen and we watch the slides together together. I got excellent feedback from the students. "

Dirk Hovy, Social media marketing: "My lessons were already heavily based on interactive tools (Jupyter notebooks), which I always upload on BlackBoard. Now I also use the myroom.unibocconi.it app to give online lectures during normal class hours. It provides many useful tools (shared whiteboard, screen sharing, chat features, etc.). I record the session and then upload it on BlackBoard."

Cesare Cavallini, Civil Law Procedure II: "Even a fundamental course in law such as had to adapt, even if the lesson before an audience of students remains irreplaceable. A one-hour video lecture, without breaks, is not a breeze: you have to be exhaustive, clear, incisive and put yourself in your students' heads. In short, you never stop learning and experimenting, but this is the beauty (and the chagrin) of our work".

Erica Corbellini, SDA Bocconi's Master in fashion and design management: "Not stopping, then finding an alternative way of working has given me a positive charge, demonstrating once more the truth of a motto in which I strongly believe:" don't worry but keep busy " In a communication that is cold, because it's at a distance, the ability to transmit in an empathic way becomes even more important, which for me means being yourself. So in the end, in my opinion, this is an initiative that has done everyone good: students and teachers " .

by Andrea Celauro
Translated by Alex Foti