Online teaching - Laboratories
Dear students,
we would like to share with you some considerations concerning the online delivery of didactic activities of the second semester as a response to the coronavirus emergency.
First of all, we would like to thank you all for the spirit of collaboration and sharing you have shown in addressing this emergency situation.
As professors in the Department we share the spirit with which the Rector emphasized that "the provision of teaching services is our priority" and we are committed to ensuring the performance of distance-teaching activities to ensure continuity of education to all the students enrolled in our Degree Courses.
The same effort is required from you, to adapt to a teaching activity provided in a different way, which forces you to change your study habits and your modes of interaction, both with us teachers and with your fellow students.
Our Degree Courses have a strong experimental fingerprint and we believe in the importance of laboratory practice for the development of skills which be fundamental for your education and for your professional future. We would like to stress the fact that, for us teachers, even in this emergency situation, it was not at all obvious to think about the online provision of laboratory courses. We have discussed, carefully considering the current situation and the external conditions. To date, we know for sure that the University will be closed until the 3rd of April, but this does not mean that it will re-open on the 4th. Actually, there is no fixed date for re-opening. We have a large number of laboratory lessons in the second semester, involving a large number of students, with the need to make several laboratory shifts. And we must/we want to ensure that all courses take place in due time, in order to allow you to sit the exams and the final graduation exams without major delays.
For this reason, we consider it necessary and undelayable to proceed with the programming and delivery of online teaching also with regard to laboratory activities. Postponing the carrying out of laboratory activities to a “date to be determined" would expose all, but especially you students, to further uncertainty now, and to big organizing problems in the medium to long term, with negative consequences on the quality of teaching and probably also on the duration of the course of study.
In re-designing the laborarory experiments in distance mode, the teachers have been guided by the training objectives and the learning outcomes extected in each course, in order to prepare functional material to achieve the objectives even in absence of laboratory testing. These activities will not reproduce faithfully what would have been done in the laboratory. However, if on one hand some learning objectives will not be attainable without the laboratory practice (e.g. acquisition of manual skills), it will be possible to strengthen other equally important training aspects, which sometimes do not find adequate space in the lab (e.g. critical processing of results at individual level).
The provision of laboratory courses in distance teaching is not in any case to be seen as a choice of "closure" of the teaching body. On the contrary, being this alternative teaching an experiment in itself, it will be very important to confront, individually if necessary but mainly through the student representatives, on the progress of the experiment and on the criticalities that we will have to face. Your suggestions and advices are for us teachers a matter for reflection and they will contribute to the continuous improvement of our teaching action, now and in the future.
When it will be possible to re-open the teaching spaces, we plan to introduce extra-curricular practical courses, attended on a voluntary basis, dedicated to the development of your manual laboratory skills.
We are confident that all those who work and study in the Degree Courses pertaining to our Department will constitute a cohesive community within the great community of the University of Turin, and that collaboration and dialogue will help us to face and overcome this emergency situation.
Best regards,
Silvia Bordiga on behalf of the Director of the Chemistry Department Marco Vincenti