L’educazione a distanza alla luce e all’ombra della pandemia

Abstract

During the months of lockdown due to the 2020 pandemic, distance learning, or remote teaching, has replaced all normal school activities, producing a sudden and global acceleration in the use of educational computer software and platforms. In this way, the Italian training system has withstood the shock wave of the quarantine, showing the usefulness of e-learning, which has long been the subject of studies, applications and reflections, but has also highlighted its many contradictions and criticalities: the gaps in access and technological skills, structural inadequacies, the hegemonic role of some educational platforms, hyper-bureaucracy, the processes of desocialization and the lack of methodological indications. Consequently, a heated debate has also emerged among proponents and critics of the use of remote teaching in educational practices of the near future. According to the author, it would be disastrous to impose a compulsory and generalized use of distance learning from above if the central nodes of an educational approach, now anachronistic and ineffective in the digital age, are not finally addressed, which requires a radical reform of its models and its practices, for too long prompted by illustrious scientific studies, educational publications and pedagogical experiments.