Donatella Persico

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute for Educational Technology ITD

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is the process through which individuals control their own learning, from the cognitive, meta-cognitive, behavioral, emotional and motivational points of view. Through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) it is an important interdisciplinary competence which has increasingly gained attention in the past co...

Collaboration is, to date, extensively adopted for supporting learning processes, both in face-to-face and in virtual learning contexts. However, technology profoundly changes the nature of human interactions and, consequently, also changes the nature of the collaborative learning process, yielding a range of new potentialities and problems. Techni...

This explorative case study investigates a game-based approach to the professional development of in-service teachers in Self-Regulated Learning. The impact of this approach was assessed in terms of acceptance of the game, knowledge gain and changes in teachers’ beliefs concerning the importance of nine design principles that can be adopted to fost...

This systematic mapping review provides an up-to-date picture of research on the use of games and game-based learning (GBL) in teacher training. Documents were retrieved systematically from Scopus and Web of Science, resulting in 38 studies that met the inclusion criteria. The review examines the evolution over time of the field, the kind of venues...

According to the socio-constructivist theories of learning, collaborative learning allows negotiation of shared meanings and co-construction of new knowledge among peers. This approach fits particularly well with healthcare professional education needs, as these professionals often face challenging issues that require the ability to fully understan...

This study, focused on collaborative learning approaches, aims to contribute to our understanding of whether and how teachers propose these kinds of activities in their daily practice. Particularly, this study aims to explore teachers’ behaviour when designing such activities for their learners with respect to different learning settings (i.e., fac...

This paper presents some preliminary results of an intervention case-study intended to improve the ability of an international community of 75 teachers to design collaborative and inclusive activities for their students. The study is carried out in the framework of an Erasmus+ project adopting a long-term, participatory, and gamified approach to te...

The most common form of teachers’ professional development (TPD) — one-shot courses using formal, transmissive methodologies — often fails to prepare teachers for complex challenges or build a long-term community of teachers. Indeed, the role of practice-sharing in informal learning contexts, and specifically in teachers’ communities of practice, i...

L'utilizzo didattico delle tecnologie e delle risorse di rete è venuto prepotentemente alla ribalta nel corso degli ultimi anni sotto la spinta di un'emergenza sanitaria senza precedenti che ha indotto Scuola e Università a spostare la didattica nella dimensione digitale, mettendo in evidenza l'impreparazione di entrambi i contesti all'adozione di...

Comparing universities and courses is of interest to a variety of stakeholders including potential students, policy makers, news and media organisations, ranking providers, and universities themselves. There are a range of existing university ranking schemes that provide comparisons (e.g. Academic Ranking of World Universities) but typically these...

In this report, we present the findings of a survey which was aimed at investigating if and how a large sample of Holocaust museums and memorials use Social Media (SM) in their communication channels. The findings reported in this study reflect the responses of 69 Holocaust museums and memorials from across the world. The most representative countr...

The goal of this invited editorial is to introduce the second set of papers received in response to the call for papers on “Challenges to the educational field: Digital Competence”. The contributions published herein include research studies focused on the identification, sharing and promotion of digital competence.

This paper reports on usage and impact on learning achievements of a dashboard developed to help monitor self-regulated learning behaviours in an online professional development path. The design of the path as well as of the dashboard were grounded on a pre-existing conceptual framework distinguishing between four different types of self-regulated...

This Special Issue of IEEE-RITA on digital competence was under preparation when the COVID-19 pandemic forced educational systems around the world to shift towards Emergency Remote Education (ERE). The emergency acted as litmus paper for a series of problems that had existed for some time. This introduction analyzes the relationships between the ch...

This study is one of the first investigations conducted within the Italian school system to capture teachers' perspective, experiences and perceptions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school education. It was performed two months after the beginning of lockdown, when online teaching and learning processes were fully in place and had rea...

In questo articolo riportiamo gli esiti di un'indagine svolta tra i docenti della scuola italiana durante il periodo del COVID-19 in un momento in cui la didattica on-line era stata ormai avviata in tutte le scuole e i processi si potevano considerare allo stato stazionario, prima delle nuove fibrillazioni causate dall'avvicinarsi degli scrutini e...

In questo articolo riportiamo gli esiti di un'indagine svolta tra i docenti della scuola italiana durante il periodo del COVID-19 in un momento in cui la didattica on-line era stata ormai avviata in tutte le scuole e i processi si potevano considerare allo stato stazionario, prima delle nuove fibrillazioni causate dall'avvicinarsi degli scrutini e...

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study conducted on the Italian school system to capture the teachers’ perspective, experiences and perceptions about education two months after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when the on-line educational processes were fully in place and reached their steady state. The paper reports...

I videogiochi possono essere uno strumento di conoscenza, valorizzazione e promozione del patrimonio culturale. Qual è la prospettiva dell’industria? Quale il contributo della ricerca scientifica? Cosa stanno facendo i musei? Che futuro ci aspetta? Questo volume è dedicato ad un’alleanza tra ricerca, istituzioni culturali e industria del videogioco...

This study reports the outcomes of a survey investigating the beliefs and self-reported behaviours of a sample of 238 in-service school teachers in Italy and Spain concerning their self-regulated professional learning about the design of learning interventions, an activity generally referred to as Learning Design (LD). The study adopts the lens of...

The 4Cs framework, concerning self-regulated professional learning in knowledge intensive domains, is the lens through which participatory practices in learning design are investigated in this paper. The framework identifies four types of participatory behaviours: Consuming, Creating, Connecting and Contributing. A survey involving 117 Italian prac...

Research in the social sciences devotes a great amount of attention to investigating the impact of video games on the individual and on society. However, results generated by this research often fail to inform game development. The present study investigated the outreach of research conducted by the academic community by interviewing 30 game develo...

University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher education institutions at a global level. Despite their being increasingly used, rankings are often strongly criticized for their social and economic implications, as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. One of these limitations is...

University ranking systems are frequently used to assess and compare universities, and are of particular interest to prospective students. Current ranking systems, however, do not assess the currently growing online dimension of universities. To overcome this limitation, the European Project Creating an Online Dimension for University Rankings (COD...

Describes a system for building adaptive Computer Based Tests.

This work describes a serious game aimed at supporting teachers in the development of competences in the conceptualization phase of Learning Design. The game builds on the 4Ts model, which addresses four main dimensions of collaborative learning activities: the task learners will carry out, the team structure of working groups, the time schedule an...

This article presents a critical examination of European policy in relation to gami-fication. We begin by describing how gamification "traveled" as an idea, evolving from controversial yet persuasive buzzword to legitimate policy priority. We then focus on how gamification was represented in Horizon 2020: the flagship European Research & Developmen...

University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher education institutions at a global level. Despite their being increasingly used, rankings are often strongly criticized for their social and economic implications, as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. One of these limitations is...

This paper explores the relationship between digital games and learning along the continuum from formal to informal learning. Games are an increasingly important component of our learning ecologies but their potential can prove difficult to fully harness due to the downsides of gaming in informal contexts and to the limitations games can present wh...

This paper reports on a literature review investigating the main ethically-related themes appearing in the academic literature on digital games, and considers their connections with games and learning, identity development, and the construction of personal beliefs. The themes explored include how videogames can shape players' attitudes or encourage...

Negli anni '80 già si parlava di Intelligenza artificiale e didattica. Per chi è interessato a capire quanto di quello che si dice oggi si dicesse già allora.

University ranking systems are being implemented by different organizations in an attempt to evaluate and compare Higher Education Institutions at a global level. Despite being more and more widely used, ranking systems are strongly criticized for their social and economic implications as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. O...

Learning design tools aim at supporting practitioners in their task of creating more innovative and effective computer-supported learning situations. Despite there being a myriad of proposed tools, their use presents challenges that recent studies link with practitioners' varied pedagogical approaches and context restrictions, as well as with barri...

The mandate of the Gaming Horizons research project was to critically challenge the status quo in video games to potentially foment change. Such a change is to recognise that all types of video games (serious/applied and arts/entertainment, on phones, consoles, traditional computers, or other platforms) are already changing the political, economic,...

One of the big challenges faced by research in the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) field has to do with the injection of innovation into real educational contexts. Very often, innovative technologies fail to be taken up by practitioners because of difficulties in absorbing both methodological and technological innovation of the target contexts....

The paper deals with a gamified approach developed to support teach-ers' reflection and awareness on a set of specific behaviours that can support informal learning. The approach adopts a metaphor, vegetable gardens to be grown, to represent the teachers' participatory practice and is enriched with specific game mechanics (tasks, goals and badges)....

Recent research suggests that training teachers as learning designers helps promote technology-enhanced educational innovations. However, little attention has been paid so far to the interplay between the effectiveness of Teacher Professional Development (TPD) instructional models promoting the role of “teachers as designers” and the capabilities (...

Self-regulated learning refers to learners’ ability to plan, conduct and evaluate their own learning. Research into self-regulated learning dates back to the 1970s, but the topic has received new attention in the discourse on competency-based learning, starting at the end of last century. It can also be argued that advances in digital technologies...

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on Digital Scholarship, aimed at better understanding the collocation of this research area at the crossroad of several disciplines and strands of research. The authors analysed 45 articlesin order to draw a picture of research in this area. In the first phase, the articles were classified...

This chapter draws a picture of the variety of representations that have been proposed to support the learning design life cycle. The intent is to show that such representations have different features and serve different purposes and that designers may find it useful to adopt one or the other according to their objectives and/or at different stage...

Despite wide-scale uptake of gamification in professional training generally, application in Teacher Professional Development (TPD) is still in its infancy. The few experiences reported hitherto mainly concentrate on fostering participation and engagement in the training intervention itself. By contrast, we believe that gamification of TPD can and...

The Peer Review (PR) is a very popular technique to support socio-constructivist and connectivist learning processes, online or face-to-face, at all educational levels, in both formal and informal contexts. The idea behind this technique is that sharing views and opinions with others by discussing with peers and receiving and providing formative fe...

While the use of social networks (SNs) and social media is increasingly permeating all sectors of the global society, in Italy there is an ongoing debate about its advantages and drawbacks for learning, especially within formal educational contexts. In order to contribute to such a debate, a study has been conducted, aimed to investigate the Italia...

This paper tackles the issue of how to support the design of effective collaborative activities in networked learning contexts. At the crossover between the 'learning design' and the 'networked learning' research sectors, notions such as 'collaborative techniques', 'design patterns' or 'scripts' are often used to describe and/or run online collabor...

Questa dispensa costituisce il materiale di accompagnamento alle video-lezioni della seconda settimana (Sezione 2) del MOOC EduOpen “Didatech”, dedicata al tema dell’auto-regolazione dell’apprendimento e alle modalità con cui è possibile progettare percorsi e ambienti di apprendimento online che favoriscano l’apprendimento auto-regolato. La struttu...

Il processo di sviluppo di interventi formativi è stato oggetto di studio sin dagli inizi del secolo scorso, ma a partire dall’inizio di questo secolo ha suscitato rinnovato interesse a causa della necessità di facilitare le scelte progettuali dei docenti in merito all’impiego di tecnologie nella formazione. Gli studi volti a sistematizzare l’elabo...

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics’ professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic concep...

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics’ professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic concep...

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics’ professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic concep...

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics’ professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic concep...

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) skills are essential in Lifelong Learning, especially in knowledge intensive jobs. This paper investigates how Technology Enhanced Learning Environments (TELEs) can support SRL in knowledge workers by proposing the development of a coherent set of technological affordances to facilitate the enactment of some of the key...

One of the core activities teachers perform as part of their professional practice is conceptual preparation of educational interventions of whatever type and at whatever level of granularity: single learning opportunities and activities, sequences, lessons, units, modules, courses or even whole programmes. A longstanding pillar in the constant que...

This paper explores the relationship between practice and learning in the workplace, by focusing on the case of teachers. It is widely acknowledged that (teacher's) professional learning is heavily informed by practice, and that an individual's capacity to self-regulate their learning can improve the quality of learning. However less is known about...

The METIS project intends to foster innovation in the educational systems by providing educators with an innovative environment, called Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE), and a workshop ‘format’ for training educators in using the ILDE to support effective learning design practices. A crucial project activity is the evaluation of whethe...

This paper explores the methodological approaches most commonly adopted in the scholarly literature on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), published during the period January 2008–May 2014. In order to identify trends, gaps and criticalities related to the methodological approaches of this emerging field of research, we analysed 60 papers selected...

Questo articolo si colloca al crocevia tra il settore del Learning Design (LD) e quello del Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in quanto propone un metodo per supportare la progettazione di attività di apprendimento online di tipo collaborativo. Nel settore del CSCL, le ‘tecniche collaborative’ e gli ‘script’ sono considerati concetti...

Lo sviluppo professionale dei docenti è il principale fattore abilitante per l’innovazione dei sistemi formativi. Nel contributo viene introdotto il concetto di Learning Design e vengono illustrate le sue promesse in termini di innovazione educativa; inoltre viene proposto un approccio per lo sviluppo professionale dei docenti e viene descritta una...

This paper proposes an analysis of current research in learning design (LD), a field aiming to improve the quality of educational interventions by supporting their design and fostering the sharing and reuse of innovative practices among educators. This research area, at the moment, focuses on three main strands: the representations that can be used...

The raise of attention to the relatively new phenomenon of MOOCs has put them at the cutting edge of the debate on networked teaching and learning. Research on MOOCs seems to have overcome the exploratory phase, and is approaching a consolidation of themes and objectives. However, little attention has been paid to methodological issues in MOOCs res...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) takes place when individuals plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning experiences. Learning assessment plays a crucial role in this process because it provides an excellent basis for the above three phases of SRL; however, the identification, design and implementation of meaningful assessment activities is not eas...

This paper aims at proposing a founding manifesto for the International Symposia on Innovation and Sustainability in Education (InSuEdu). We analyze two possible interpretations of Innovation and Sustainability in Education: (1) sustainability of methodological and technological innovation processes in education, and (2) creation and implementation...

This paper analyses the case of the Theme Teams, i.e. one of the instruments used within the STELLAR Network of Excellence to develop human capital and support research capacity in the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) field. Qualitative and quantitative data about how this instrument worked are presented in the paper, with the aim to demonstrate...

This paper describes an experience where the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been adapted for use in the evaluation of methodological and technological innovations determined by the introduction of a new e-learning system in an Italian online university. While the original TAM allows one to assess acceptance and adoption of a new technology,...

The need for higher educational systems to undergo a radical process of innovation is recognized worldwide, but how such a process has to be triggered, managed and sustained is far from being fixed. The paper illustrates the case study of a small Italian online university where a number of actions (i.e. a preliminary analysis of the existing system...