Experimenting Earth Science labs at University of Basilicata during the Coronavirus-19 pandemic

Abstract:

The Coronavirus-19 pandemic strongly affected the worldwide education system. Depending on the education level, on the availability and quality of instruments for remote connections, on the readiness of teachers to move to new modalities of provide lessons, the impact has been quite different creating also further social division in terms of the actual access to education offer.

It has been also the occasion to learn and experiment new modality of teaching and a huge production of new education materials that will survive to the pandemic period becoming available for extending/integrating usual course offers toward new perspective and potential (remote) users.

Among the educational activities, particularly affected by the pandemic are the laboratory classes that, more than others, require co-presence and interaction among teachers and students.

In this paper we report our experience at University of Basilicata during the Coronavirus-19 lockdown period. A different way to organize the laboratory activities within a Satellite Remote Sensing course will be described in terms of the difficulties overcome and opportunities for the future that have arisen even in the framework of European Project EO4GEO, CopHub.AC and CorDiNet.