Distance Learning and Digital Scholarship: New Challenges for Faculty Development

The professional development of university teachers is a policy priority of Higher Education on a global scale. Teaching and Learning Centers have been built at international level and they provide validation and valorization of academics’ competences developed through training. The need for research processes and innovation in teaching methods has become even more pressing with the 2020 pandemic emergency. In that circumstance, all universities were forced to improvise and hybridize teaching with digital tools. The traditional scholarship of teaching and learning of the university has thus been transformed into a field of experimentation of practices. The research specifically investigates the experience of Distance Learning (DL), defining the construct, to bring out the changes in teaching practice, paying particular attention to didactic mediation and evaluation, two areas considered foundational and emblematic in teaching-learning action. Through the administration of an online questionnaire to which 721 teachers responded, we highlight the metamorphoses involved in mediation and evaluation. The findings highlighted the need to support teachers’ digital training to develop a new type of sophisticated knowledge and the ability to transform disciplinary content into digitalized disciplinary content.