Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

ONELab is the project of the Department of Communication and Economics that makes the traditional classes of the study programmes available on video

ONELab, the project that since last year has made available on video the traditional classes of the study programmes offered by the Department of Communication and Economics (DCE) of Unimore, is gaining momentum, not only among the students, but also by the international scientific community.

Developed to give the opportunity to follow the lessons also to students who cannot physically attend, the project provides for the availability of an online professor visiting timetable to integrate the traditional one.

Over 1000 students of the first and second year of DCE have used the system, and those who have used ONELab regularly have obtained better results compared to those who did not use it.

Professor Giovanna Galli, Director of the Department of Communication and Economics, stated that “We are very proud of this result, not only because in just one year we managed to set up an operating system with the minimum human supervision, but also and mainly for the benefits that this system is bringing to the learning process of our students. Students are quite happy to have video classes available, and ONELab support will gradually grow until covering all years of all study programmes offered by the Department of Communication and Economics starting from the next academic year”.

A scientific work “ONELab: Online Education with Minimal Human Supervision” and directed by the IT professor Marco Furini, professor Giovanna Galli, Director of the Department of Communication and Economics, and professor Maria Cristiana Martini, professor of Social Statistics, has been created within the project, and has been selected for the presentation to the “International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good (Goodtehcs)” held in Bologna at the end of last November. The conference is a point of reference for those who want to use science and technology for social purposes, aiming at improving education and health or ensuring safer and more liveable societies. Scientific works of researchers from all over the world, from the US to Canada, from Japan to England, from Spain to Germany, from France to Greece were presented at the conference.

IT Professor Marco Furini stated that “During the last years, several projects have tried to exploit the new technologies to change the way of teaching, but ONELab was designed with a different objective: we did not want to change the way of teaching, as we believe that attending classes is still the best way to learn from a teaching and social perspective and cannot be equalled through technologies. ONELab combines the traditional teaching with a set of videos that allow those students who cannot attend the classes to participate to the educational process anyway. We are referring to non-resident students, working students, disabled students, but also students who cannot attend all classes of a programme for some reason.  To curb costs we also tried to minimise human supervision. That is why we have designed and developed an IT architecture that is able to automate almost all processes. What we achieved is a system that requires only one full-time human resource on the project for assembling and broadcasting classes online.”

Professor Maria Cristiana Martini, teacher of Social Statistics, recognised that “The first quantitative results are surely interesting. During the first year of use, ONE Lab has managed 49 teachings and produced 1,376 video classes for a total of over 2 thousand hours of  videos. More than 1,000 students have used the system and watched over 70,000 hours of video in total. Data shows that students use the system every day of the week and not only in working days, for example a 15% of accesses occurs on week-ends and at any time of the day (18% of accesses is recorded in the evening and at night). According to the data collected, those students who have used ONELab regularly have obtained better results compared to those who did not used it: the average number of exams passed is double (3.6 for those who follow online classes vs. 1.8 for those who never access the system), the average score is higher (25.7 vs. 23.8) and the average number of training credits gained is more than double (28.4 for regular users vs. 13.8 for non users).”

Categorie: International - english