On 11 th March 2020, the Director-General of The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. From this date, in Italy as in most parts of the world, life dramatically changed in many aspects: smart working and remote teaching became familiar words, while students and teachers at all educational levels, from primary school to university, had to face sudden changes and new challenges. Emergency remote teaching became widespread, and new methodologies to deliver classes and courses were adopted by educational institutions.In this paper, we focus on the impact of the remote learning experience on university students, in particular, engineering students enrolled at Politecnico di Milano. Subjects recruited from all engineering courses, from the first to the fifth year, were asked to fill in a multidimensional survey. Respondents participated in the study voluntarily and more than 3,000 students completed the entire survey. Overall, 60 items about the participants' perceptions about the challenges of emergency remote teaching, compared with the pre-Covid-19 usual in-presence teaching were included.The survey addressed 6 dimensions: Organization of the emergency remote Teaching, Subjective Well Being, Metacognition, Self-Efficacy, Identity, and Socio-Demographic information. Preliminary results show significant differences in the students' perceptions concerning the following three factors: the effectiveness and the organization of the courses, the change in the university students' evaluation of their instructors, and the change in the university students' perception of difficulties in the switch from in-presence instruction to online learning. Data analysis also suggests a relevant impact of an emergency remote teaching on students' perceived Metacognition and Self Efficacy.

By 11 March 2020, the phrase “COVID-19” had officially entered everyday life across most of the word. Each level of education suddenly faced new changes and new challenges. Emergency remote teaching became widespread, and new methodologies to deliver classes and courses were adopted by educational institutions. In this paper, we focus on the impact of the remote learning experience of engineering students enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano. The subjects were recruited from all engineering courses from the first to the fifth year and were asked to complete a multidimensional survey. The survey featured 66 items regarding the participants’ perceptions of the challenges of emergency remote teaching compared with pre-COVID-19 in-person teaching. The questionnaire addressed six dimensions: the organization of emergency remote teaching, subjective well-being, metacognition, self-efficacy, identity, and socio-demographic information. In this paper, we describe the entire survey and discuss a preliminary analysis. Using Cronbach’s alpha test, a confirmatory factor analysis, and the t-test, we performed a more in-depth analysis concerning the outcomes of metacognition and self-efficacy. The data analysis suggested a small, unexpected change in the metacognition strategies. The students, in some regards, improved their learning strategies. Some other answers underlined their appreciation of the courses’ organization and the lack of relationships with their peers and teachers.

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An activity about the Millikan oil drop experiment is proposed to a group of 17-years-old students attending Liceo Scientifico opzione scienze applicate at the "IIS J. C. Maxwell" school located in Milan (Italy). The students were involved in some laboratory activities, cooperative working and whole class sessions guided by some teacher's questions. The classes are asked to be involved in the solution of a complex problem, starting from the experimental study of the motion of a body in a viscous fluid until facing the problem of the measurement of the charge some tiny oil drops immersed in an electric field. The quantification of the quantum of electric charge was possible, and the students were first-hand dragged in a historical experiment. Primary goal of the activities is the improvement of skills such as the capacity of formulating hypotheses, the employment of an available instrumentation, the collection and analyses of data, the resolution of mathematical equation for the identification of physical quantities of interest. A didactic video of the same experiment was produced by the Experimental teaching lab. ST2 1 of Politecnico di Milano in order to foster the students' reflection on the same experience as a follow-up activity and, in an Open Educational Resources philosophy (OER), it will be made available on the web site of Lab. ST2 YouTube channel. Our project was developed in the context of Piano Nazionale Lauree Scientifiche (PLS), a government programme which funds didactic innovation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Higher Education and Secondary School level.

The need for educational approaches that comply with the restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic has raised a number of critical issues for students of different age groups. The delicate transition between high school and university has become a key point to focus on, leading many institutions to replan projects dedicated to students involved in this transition. A Physics vocational training project for high school students was carried out in the school year 2020–2021, and it was replicated in the school year 2021–2022. The project included webinars, self-assembled laboratory group experiences, and peer evaluation. The starting point on which we designed our project is that learning is an experience; thus, we built the entire project by particularly focusing on two peculiarities. One peculiarity is the assessment methods: student presentations describing their own experiences were evaluated by teachers and their peers. The second peculiarity is the open approach with respect to how students handle experimental activities. We present a description of these projects along with the results of an evaluation survey filled out by the participants and a descriptive analysis of the assessment strategies. Students appreciated the design of the entire project and, better still, the peer evaluation process. Moreover, we discovered that the evaluation provided by the teachers is lower compared to the assessment reported by the students. This disparity holds potential significance from a statistical perspective and warrants further investigation.