Higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide have been deeply affected by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures. HEIs are environments at high risk of COVID-19 diffusion, due to the high number of people sharing the same environment, and complex to protect, because of the multiple functions present…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are more critical than ever to help societies respond to the complex challenges of our times. Recognising that these challenges require HEIs to adopt holistic innovations in teaching, research and collaboration activities, the European Commission (EC) and the OECD have developed the HEInnovate guiding…

The University of Naples Federico II (Italy) offers a nine-month formative training program aimed at software development for the Apple technology ecosystem to ~400 learners per year and utilises the Challenge Based Learning ("CBL") methodology as a framework for learning. As a collaborative and self-guided, inquiry-based learning…

This article deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a point of acceleration for the emergence of a distinctive and yet unstable problematization of the 20th-century school form. Focusing on the Italian public and policy debate on education and adopting an archaeological analytics, it explores what 'other' coordinates for the forms of schooling are…

In 2020, Year 12 students at John Curtin College of the Arts, were required to model COVID-19 data from five different countries in order to find correlations between daily infections and unemployment rates, in order to make future predictions. Work received from students demonstrated how the task successfully provided unique learning…

Climate change and natural disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and geopolitical shocks have increasingly disrupted school education around the world in recent years. Whether leading to school closures, school destructions or repeated interruptions in students' learning experiences, these external shocks have translated into lost learning…

This paper deals with the pros and cons in relation to the teaching strategy imposed specifically in Italy by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has involved and continues to involve significant changes in the setting in which students and teachers interact. The approach is multidisciplinary, in that the perspective advanced is both historical and…

In the last year a new virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease caused by it (COVID-19) has quickly spread around the world, leading the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency and, then, a global pandemic status. The strategies adopted by many countries to reduce the impact of the pandemic were mainly based on social distancing…

The Coronavirus pandemic, forcing all schools and universities to exclusively activate distance learning (DL), has triggered an unprecedented innovative process. E-learning had remained a niche resource for a few innovators, experts and enthusiasts; but, with the forced DL due to COVID-19, teachers of all levels had to engage in a new form of…

The competition of civilizations forced the European universities to adapt to the competition with the Chinese and American universities. European integration cannot advance without the collaboration between European universities. An answer to these challenges is the CIVICA project, the European University of Social Sciences, a consortium of the…

This work presents 'Dove sta di casa la scuola', an online course for teachers promoted by the Small School Movement during the COVID-19 emergency. The course aimed to provide alternatives to lecture-based distance learning using the domestic environment as a context for 'low-intensity' digital learning. Such an experience, involving 7000 Italian…

The pandemic triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has produced worldwide interruptions of face-to-face teaching activity in both schools and universities. In Italy, the quarantine began in the second half of February 2020 and lasted for all the second semester of lectures. The University of Bologna, where all the authors of the present article are…

The paper revisits the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy and particularly in Lombardy region, the first and initially most severely affected area among western countries. First, we provide an overview of the impact of the pandemic in the country and in the region, mentioning the turning points and the main effects on the national and local economy.…

With the COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting lockdown, Italian schools have continued to provide education using distance learning systems. In this emergency, the primary aim of the Ministry of Education was to guarantee each student's right to education. The expression "School Never Stops" ("La Scuola non si ferma") is a clear…

The pandemic COVID-19 has brought the closure of schools of all levels and all universities in Italy, since early March 2020 up to the end of the teaching period (first half of June 2020). However, almost all universities guaranteed the continuity of educational and professional courses by using several distance education modalities. The purpose…