Innovation in university teaching is the point where three transformations, so far separate, converge: the availability of open, documented research data; the spread of artificial intelligence tools in the hands of teachers and students alike; and the European and national demand for competences that can be certified and updated over an entire working life. None of the three concerns a single discipline, and none of the three is settled by a refresher course on tools.

Addressed first of all to doctoral candidates and early-career researchers, The Learning Shift starts from a precise challenge: those who produce new knowledge must also be able to make it learnable, verifiable, accessible and transferable. This community occupies a decisive position between research, teaching and the professions: today it contributes to producing knowledge; tomorrow it will be called upon to teach it, communicate it, assess it and turn it into competences.

The Digital Forge Camp format turns this challenge into an intensive, collaborative environment. Over four half-days, data, papers, protocols, cases and research questions become material for designing learning experiences. Vision talks, demonstrations and cross-disciplinary exchange take participants from the research object to the learning object, up to the definition of observable and recognisable results.

The school explores how open data, documented according to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable), can feed new teaching practices; how AI can support design, tutoring, feedback and assessment while keeping responsibilities and choices visible; and how micro-credentials and other forms of certification can make competences legible and open to updating. It is the FAIR principles that make a research object reusable by those who did not produce it: the technical condition of the passage to the learning object. Methods, languages, technologies, accessibility and participation are treated as parts of the same ecosystem.

The Learning Shift creates a space in which experiences born in different disciplines meet, cross-fertilise and become shared heritage. A shift from individual practice to the collective capacity to innovate university teaching, preparing a new generation of researchers able to produce knowledge and put it into circulation.

Four half-days, eight blocks of ninety minutes, sixteen lessons of forty-five minutes. Forty places, free of charge, assigned through public selection on the basis of curriculum, motivation and coherence of the applicant’s path. No age requirement operates as an exclusion — earlier career stages are given priority — and the selection attends to gender balance, to the plurality of institutions represented and to participation from the regions of southern Italy.

The progression is deliberate. It starts from what can be seen working — two demonstrators and the discipline that feeds them; it goes back to the methodological foundation that makes them possible, the FAIR data object; it moves on artificial intelligence, from the way a model is built to what it does in a classroom; and it closes with the conditions that make a result learnable and recognisable: immersive environments, quality, accessibility and certification.

Three threads run across the modules rather than occupying a slot of their own: the FAIR condition that makes a research object reusable, the accessibility of what is produced, and the recognition of competence — micro-credentials, Open Badges and the evidence that has to sit behind them. The lesson abstracts, published with the final programme, indicate where each of them is addressed.

Designing for the online classroom: environments, materials, and the mediation between teacher and learner (title to be confirmed)
Simone TORSANI
University of Genoa