(by Fulvio Oscar Benussi, Aidr partner) “A single platform, integrated with all the services and functionalities useful for schools, from tools for digital teaching to spaces for storing content. This is foreseen by the Ministry of Education which has set up, in recent weeks, a working group to guarantee the institutes the new tool in a short time, within the next school year. The group got together again today. "
This is the beginning of the announcement that the MIUR published on the institutional website of the ministry on Friday 11 December
In this article we will propose an initial evaluation of the advantages and risks that this choice, in our opinion, may entail.
The publication on the institutional website and in the press of the news relating to the new platform that the MIUR is preparing has aroused a certain, understandable annoyance among teachers. This is due to the fact that the Covid emergency has imposed on schools and on individual teachers the burden of continuous changes in working hours and organization of work as well as the need to learn how to use platforms for carrying out distance learning. (hereinafter DAD) which in many cases have been changed several times in the last period on the basis of indications from the MIUR and, or from school managers.
A first positive element that we identify in the ministerial initiative is that the preparation of a national digital platform explicitly favors digital orientation by MIUR and this could favor the non-occasional diffusion of digital in the school system by reducing the arguments against those teachers. who usually express their opposition to this innovation. It could also promote: a rethinking of the ways of "doing school", of the ways of creating educational environments that are more attentive to the needs expressed by the new generations, of the deepening of innovative pedagogical approaches suitable for supporting the development of new skills, such as problems, critical thinking, cooperation, creativity, computational thinking, self-employment, action learning and student co-working, etc.
Instead, we see a risk linked to the possible "temptation" on the part of the MIUR to make its use compulsory by teachers. Although perhaps an obligation could be considered to protect privacy in the case of managing pupils 'and students' data (we will discuss this later in the article), it does not appear appropriate, for example, in relation to the other sections of the platform. In fact, an obligation in these areas would risk damaging the freedom of teaching which could inhibit experiments, both those in progress and those that could be carried out in the future. It is no coincidence that some voices of dissent to the creation of a national platform come precisely from those innovative teachers who have carried out, and it is essential that they can continue to carry out without obstacles, experimental activities of digital innovation in teaching.
The national platform will allow to solve privacy problems in the DAD environment.
Given the rules on privacy and on the functions performed by coockies in Internet services used to carry out distance learning and the recent ruling of the European Court of Justice on the Privacy Shield, it was urgent to act to protect teachers and school managers from any legal action against them. charge you act for problems of violation of the privacy of minors in their care We therefore welcome the news of the creation of a national platform since it was obviously unfair to "download" on teachers and school principals the burden of choosing, to carry out the DAD, internet services that comply with the indications provided by the Privacy Guarantor given the linguistic and technical complexities to be faced in order to make the right decision. We wrote about it in the article "Distance learning: smart teaching and smart learning in safety" where we hoped for an intervention by the Minister in this regard. The creation of a national platform will also avoid the risks related to privacy relating to teachers involved in distance learning activities. However, alongside these certainly very positive elements, we point out the concern for the risks, connected to the concentration of data potentially coming from all schools in Italy, that hacker attacks may occur on the platform. In addition to these risks, the risks related to possible data breaches must also be considered and for this reason we hope that the platform that is being prepared has the cyber security features necessary to avoid them.
Among the elements to be considered in the development and implementation of the platform, the problems relating to the correction and evaluation of digital documents that will be managed and recorded on it must be considered. And, with regard to evaluation, the criticality linked to the non-adaptation of the state examination at the end of the upper secondary school cycle to evaluation criteria that enhance the acquisition by students of disciplinary and digital skills to the detriment of the mere knowledge of the disciplinary contents. Perhaps the following quote could be considered a bit provocative, but we think it is time for MIUR to make a choice of priorities in the evaluation between competences and contents. Here is the quote: ““ No one can serve two masters, because either he will hate the one and love the other; or he will be faithful to one and despise the other; you cannot serve God and mammon ”.
Another positive element of the availability of a national platform for teachers is the following. The MIUR platform, being an environment for exclusively school use, could allow teachers to freely upload and use multimedia materials in teaching, enjoying the legislation on copyright protection which allows free use at school. This would make it possible to propose media education courses to students even in the case of distance lessons. This was evidently not possible in platforms of private suppliers as this would have exposed teachers to possible litigation for infringement of copyright.
We conclude our analysis with a reference to what happened in France with the CNED platform called “My class at home”. Well, the national platform, set up in the pre-covid era, was, on the recommendation of the French Ministry, used in the pandemic period, but encountered some difficulties. In fact, the site has suffered hacker attacks which it has resisted, but due to too many simultaneous connections, access to the site has been saturated and has been blocked several times.