Bocconi's Three Weeks of Distance Learning. Nearly 3.2 Million Minutes of Online Classes Viewed

AN AVERAGE OF 6,600 STUDENTS LOGGED ONTO THE ONLINE PLATFORM EVERY DAY, WITH PEAKS OF OVER 9,000 STUDENTS; 3,200 VIDEOS UPLOADED, VIEWED BY OVER 10,000 INDIVIDUAL USERS, AND MORE THAN 3,300 LIVE SESSIONS: THE NUMBERS OF THE FIRST WEEKS OF ONLINE TEACHING OFFERED BY THE UNIVERSITY


In thirty-six hours, Bocconi's classes had to be completely reorganized. The University has become a seat of distance learning, as they say in the profession: live streaming, recorded lectures, online material allowing students to follow the 427 courses offered this semester. The health emergency has brought almost everything to a standstill, but not the passion of teaching and the need to avoid interrupting one's studies. The proof lies in the numbers: in these first three weeks, on average, more than 6,600 students per day connected to the e-learning platform, with peaks in excess of nine thousand. Numbers that are in fact the same as on a regular day of classes.

Going into the details, it emerges that in three weeks Bocconi faculty held a total of 3,344 live sessions and recorded a total of 3,200 videos. More than 10,100 unique users viewed the videos uploaded by class instructors, for a grand total of almost 3,170,000 minutes of lessons being viewed (313 minutes per student).

The most viewed class? The one in Computer Science for Bachelors of Science held by Maurizio De Pra, viewed by more than one thousand different students. "It must be said that this course, unlike maybe others, is very much based on practice. In fact, the course teaches how to use the main types of software”, explains De Pra, instructor for Italian-speaking classes (his colleague Massimo Ballerini teaches the English version of the course). "For these lessons, the video tutorials that I recorded were about Excel, but later on I will focus on Phyton, today's generalpurpose coding software." How do you keep students' attention alive in distance teaching? "Definitely don't make overly long videos. I did up to maximum 15 minutes each." 

by Andrea Celauro
Translated by Alex Foti