Help Teaching and Digital Resources: A Comparison of Classroom and Distance-Learning Experience in a Course of Methodology of Social Research

The contribution compares two teaching experiences developed atthe University of Salerno in the pre- and post-pandemic periods. Help Teachingis a supplementary course that supports official courses, thus preparingstudents for their exams. In this case, it has supported the course ofMethodology and Techniques of Social Research. Before the spread of thepandemic, the course was developed in the classroom with the aid of digitalresources. After the pandemic, it was taught in virtual mode through theMicrosoft Teams platform. The course was divided into two main parts: a firstpart in which students were expected to acquire a scientific vocabulary andknowledge of theoretical, methodological, and technical issues; a second part inwhich students were guided through the critical application of collection,processing, and quantitative data analysis techniques. The lessons werestructured by developing five distinct interrelated topics: research design, inwhich students were encouraged to reflect on the entire process of the research,moving from the theoretical to the empirical; the survey, where students learnedto draft a questionnaire and organize a survey, while reflecting on opportunitiesand constraints given by subjects and context; scaling techniques, in whichstudents learned to measure complex concepts; univariate and bivariateanalyses, in which they learned to organize and analyze data as well asrepresent them graphically. In both cases, the course was designed mixingfrontal lectures, collective activities, individual meetings, and self-assessmentpauses. This contribution underlines the differences revealed in classroom anddistance-learning, and how we can use digital resources.