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Top2. E-Learning Centres Versus University Icts
The development of University Centres able to help higher education creating an Italian common area for ICTs (E-learning Centres or University ICTs) is only the first attempt towards this direction, as the need of digital skills represents nowadays a true emergency that arises every day worldwide even in response to university pedagogical needs and in direct correspondence with the Centres for teaching and learning (Challis, Holt, Palmer, 2009, pp. 371-383). These latters may be considered as a set of infrastructures characterized by the sum of educational, research and service resources as employed and performed by teachers, students and administrators. The aim of such infrastructures is to create “real and virtual environments” able to strongly support teaching, research and services, providing better learning conditions to students and optimal teaching conditions to all teachers at all levels, even in third cycle education. In this context, these infrastructures may represent an efficient tool to support new education trends.
Technological infrastructures provide indeed the necessary prerequisites to develop optimal conditions for a more accurate didactic planning in terms of objectives and organization, and for the best management of university services and courses, as well as for a more significant inter-institutional and territorial connection. ICT systems, considered cross-wise, may support a specialized education and a research of excellence when focused on research and education “methodological axes”. Assuming that the efficient use of ICTs relies first of all on the behaviours of those who work in that context, there are no doubts about the importance of examining the reception models of the technological and e-learning tools available to research, teaching and laboratory activities. In particular, those e-learning activities that have encouraged learning and teaching have become important components that tends to include, even if often underused at educational level, a “decentralized” idea of education, integrated and intra and inter-communicative between the campus components, the flows of information, the constituents and the different infrastructures and services(is increasingly available at community service centers such as telelearning centers, and “cyber cafes” ecc.), between teachers, staff and students, between education and research, between past and new procedures etc.