Lifelong Education at the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic: an Analysis of Participants’ Perception
Merinda Piersanti, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale di Teramo (Italy)
Silvia D’Albenzio, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise (IZSAM) (Italy)
Ombretta Pediconi, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise (IZSAM) (Italy)
Abstract
The Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale of Teramo (www.izs.it) is a public health institution of the Italian National Health System. It offers high added-value services in the areas of animal health and welfare, veterinary public health and environmental protection, adopting a One Health approach. Since 1990, the Institute has planned and delivered residential and e-learning courses thanks to the presence of a dedicated training unit, whose learning services are compliant to the UNI EN ISO 9001:2015 standard. The knowledge management system built along the years, responds to the learning needs expressed at national and international level by competent authorities and other stakeholders.
COVID-19 accelerated the digital transformation, already in progress, of the Italian public administrations. The physical distancing imposed by the pandemic forced the institute to introduce a complete reorganisation of the working asset and in the case of the learning services, residential events were transformed into synchronous and asynchronous at distance courses. The use of web based technologies became the essential way to spread and share scientific know-how to the main group of our primary beneficiaries (veterinarians, biologists, lab technicians, chemicals, pharmacists, medical doctors and others).
All the synchronous activities were supported by the Cisco Webex platform.
Since June 2020 till August 2021, 83 on-line courses were delivered, reaching out almost 9000 participants.
An on-line survey was launched to a selected target group of attendees of the courses held during the last 18 months, to assess their satisfaction and better plan the future educational proposals. Through Survey Monkey platform, a multiple-choice questionnaire was delivered to almost 3000 participants of our national on-line initiatives. To date, around 20% of them successfully completed the questionnaire (the survey will be available till January, 15, 2022). The analysis of the survey results is useful to better address the future educational offer of the institute and better calibrate the various technical solutions for distance learning.
Keywords: Lifelong education, distance learning, COVID-19 pandemic; web based training methodologies, survey
References:
S. Benini, 2021, Pedagogical models supporting education and health practice after the Covid-19 pandemic, Università di Bologna, VOL. 17, N. 38, pp. 136 – 147
O. Pediconi, V. Matarese (2021), Transforming a residential course on research article writing into an online learning experience, 14th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, Online, 8-9 November, 2021, ICERI2021 Proceedings