A teachers’ training program at the University of Genoa

Teaching is one of the most challenging professions. In our society, knowledge is expanding rapidly, and modern technologies are demanding teachers to learn how to use them fruitfully. While new technologies increase teachers’ training needs, they also offer part of the solution. Information and communication technology (ICT) can provide more flexible and effective ways for teachers professional development. However, teachers tend to integrate technologies in their teaching, more easily and more fruitfully, when they experienced ICT skills as learners. The universities and teacher training institutions also seem to recognize the importance of integrating ICT in education and teacher training, even if the implementations of the appropriate practices is not always a priority in their financial plans. This training seems particularly urgent for teachers of Health Professions, because first of all, they are professionals and secondly they are teachers. This project aimed to stimulate a pilot group of Health Professions Degree course teachers to adopt instructional methods able to exploit the potential of ICT offered by the University of Genoa. The specificity and the territorial organization of such courses at the University of Genoa need, not only, to train teachers to use innovative teaching methods that engage the students in a participative way, but also to find solutions to minimize the displacement of teachers and students, without diminishing the quality and effectiveness of the training offered, but rather increasing its attractiveness. This training model started with creating virtual cooperative learning-teaching communities as a base for the permanent teacher training and this paper focuses on the instructional design method as a way to organize the whole design process. This article approaches a model of teacher training supported on the ICT potential as a virtual learning environment which makes interactive communication and cooperative learning in a socio-cultural perspective. In this paper, the teacher training approaches show that many cases adopt ICT into their training process as a real integrated training environment allowing teachers to experience ICT-based pedagogies. This project has also the objective to establish cooperative learning communities for the continuous training of teachers and the educational innovation in Centers. The results state that ICT policies are still not well developed in the Faculties of Medicine and reveal only a partial match between policies, needs, and the actual in-service training. Innovative applications of ICT are not enough promoted. We need more studies comparing effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different training approaches. However, during our short course, we could grasp some hint for identifying some criticalities; in a nutshell, we can say that the participants appreciated the opportunity to immediately put into practice the theoretical seminars and the ICT topics they recognized as immediately usable in their courses, while remaining indifferent to those requiring more specialized skills such as creating video lessons. We also realized they are still timid while using, as students, ICT tools as forum for communicating among them and with their tutors.