From Traditional Face to Face to Interactive Lectures: Some Considerations and Experiences

The economic crisis, the increasing unemployment rate and the ICT revolution make the education reform deeply challenging, since the young must be prepared to face and handle a more and more unpredictable labour market. Methods that had been applied for decades, in consequence, have to be revised in depth. Traditional teaching provides students with a strong preparation, so as to make them able to keep up to date and master new subjects and technologies in rapid evolution. Such fundamental skills must now be enforced: flexibility, autonomy, interdisciplinary work, capability to face new tasks in new environments. This work discusses some aspects of the problem and proposes a possible revision of traditional face to face lectures. This method can be applied to primary and secondary school as well and is mainly based on some teaching experiments carried out during a long-lasting experience as a lecturer at the School of Engineering of Ferrara University (Italy).