L'ingegnerizzazione dei processi per il miglioramento delle performance delle aziende pubbliche

Nonostante gli approcci teorici più recenti, dal New Public Management al Public Value, sottolineino l’importanza della centralità dei bisogni del destinatario dei beni e dei servizi nella definizione dell’azione pubblica, il tema dell’ingegnerizzazione e della re-ingegnerizzazione dei processi organizzativi continua a rappresentare un aspetto poco affrontato nella Pubblica Amministrazione italiana. Nato come progetto fortemente interdisciplinare grazie al contributo di economisti aziendalisti, sociologi dell’organizzazione, psicologi del lavoro e ingegneri, questo lavoro si concentra sull’uso di alcuni strumenti capaci di migliorare la performance organizzativa, ma solitamente utilizzati in ambito privato, quali il Quality Funcion Deployment (QFD) e il Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Gli spazi organizzativi indagati, l’area di supporto alla ricerca scientifica dell’Ateneo di Cagliari e il servizio di asili nido del Comune di Cagliari, hanno consentito di approfondire la conoscenza dei processi produttivi in modo diffuso, agevolando la riscrittura di parte dell’architettura dei processi partendo dai bisogni dei destinatari degli output realizzati

Online learning mediated by social teaching platforms: an experience from a flipped undergraduate physics course in renewable energies

Active learning strategies and information technology-based pedagogies are perceived as beneficial and their use and development in academic courses is fast increasing. Faculties can use them to design courses that are challenging and fresher, creative, and meaningful for students, to meet students' needs and to promote the learning of contents in a social environment, fostering cooperation and the exchange of ideas among peers. Among the active learning strategies recently developed, the peer-instruction and the flipped classroom are prominent in this field. It has been shown that these practices help students in their understanding of contents and consequently in reaching better results in final exam scores. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 has forced classes in many academic institutions to move to remote teaching under emergency conditions and has deprived students of much of their social interactions. We show here an experience on applying online learning mediated by social teaching platforms and flipped classroom concepts to an undergraduate course on renewable energies provided amid the Covid-19 pandemic at the Physics Department of the University of Cagliari (Italy) in 2020. The constraints of forced distance learning have been turned into an opportunity to test an alternate course format in a complete online environment. An analysis on students' feedback about our learning method has been performed by a post-diagnostic satisfaction questionnaire, indicating an overall positive effects of active learning strategies in the students' learning experience. The analysis of their achievements during the course provides confirmation for the positive outcome and shows that the flipped classroom architecture is as robust as the traditional methods when facing the constraints of remote learning

Online learning of physics during a pandemic: A report from an academic experience in Italy

The arrival of the Sars-Cov II has opened a new window on teaching physics in academia. Frontal lectures have left space for online teaching, teachers have been faced with a new way of spreading knowledge, adapting contents and modalities of their courses. Students have faced up with a new way of learning physics, which relies on free access to materials and their informatics knowledge. We decided to investigate how online didactics has influenced students’ assessments, motivation, and satisfaction in learning physics during the pandemic in 2020. The research has involved bachelor (n = 53) and master (n = 27) students of the Physics Department at the University of Cagliari (N = 80, 47 male; 33 female). The MANOVA supported significant mean differences about gender and university level with higher values for girls and master students in almost all variables investigated. The path analysis showed that student-student, student-teacher interaction, and the organization of the courses significantly influenced satisfaction and motivation in learning physics. The results of this study can be used to improve the standards of teaching in physics at the University of Cagliar

Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape

This open access volume is a call for ecological awareness and action through communication. It offers perspectives on how we, as humans, posit ourselves in relation to, and as part of, the environment in both verbal and non-verbal discourse. The contributions investigate a variety of situated communicative practices and how they instantiate and potentially influence our actions. Through the frameworks of ecolinguistics, multimodal studies and ecoliteracy, the book discusses how the environmental crisis is communicated as an urgent global and local issue in a variety of media, texts and events. The contributions present a wide range of case studies (including news articles, institutional websites, artwork installations, promotional texts, signposting, social campaigns and other), and they explore how communicative actions can help meet the challenges of ecologically-oriented change. The focus is on the impact that linguistic and multimodal communication can have on acting in, with and towards the environment seen as living ecosystems, or 'lifescapes'. The chapters offer a reflection on the way we experience, endorse, reframe and resist value systems in ecological communication, and propose alternative and healthier perspectives to respect and preserve the common and nurturing lifescapes through awareness and action