La Mission didattica dell’Università italiana nell’era post COVID-19

During and after the Covid-19 emergency, the Italian university has experienced an acceleration of changes that have enhanced its central function in the learnfare of young students, poised between anxiety-inducing risks, unemployment and underemployment, and dissatisfaction in social life. In fact, during the lockdown, the university continued to represent a place in everyday life from which to draw indispensable resources for growth. The disruption of didactics, that is, the digitisation of all forms of academic transmission, constituted both an experiential and theoretical-structural watershed between the university of relationships (before) and the university of performance. The essay aims to analyse whether and how the new didactic mission of the university in the post-Covid era has been able, after the emergent and then full-scale adaptations, to effectively fulfil its dual role, as a pillar of competence/life skills development and as an agent of learnfare for inequality reduction and a channel for democratic participation. Academic teaching is analysed with reference to: digitisation, the introduction of quality assessment mechanisms and internationalisation. The thesis is that these processes of change have increasingly prompted changes in didactics, but not always from the perspective of the welfare of the youth population and student engagement. In conclusion, some lessons are drawn from Covid-19. it was an educational and social experiment for Italy, which was lagging behind in terms of ITC and digital skills, and it made visible the need to change, in teaching, the foundations of the didactic model unfortunately internalised by most academics based on one-sidedness, uniformity, and time-saving.