Learning from university students on chnages prompted by emergency remote teaching: exploratory analysis of an empirical survey

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on many dimensions of living and working conditions; and uncertainties about developments in the near future are still severe. This paper considers what happened in universities generally forced into online teaching overnight. Drawing on an online survey conducted during the lockdown by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, this article describes students' living and study conditions (respondent rate of about 20%) detected by a large set of closed and open questions. The survey provides significant information on the students' real off-campus conditions. It gives important indications about the tools most useful for inclusive teaching, and highlights the main difficulties that emerged during the lockdown, and emphasizing the variability across thematic areas. Interviews with students provided data for a multidimensional analysis that the paper performs by combining non-parametric multivariate analysis of closed questions and textual analyses, thereby capturing crucial issues such as type of study, gender, seniority. It is now clear that exit from the emergency will be a gradual process that could be better governed on the basis of some of the results illustrated here. Various considerations support the discussion as it considers the advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses, that clearly emerge in the innovative learning environment set up overnight by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.