Covid does not stop the will of young Italians to enroll in university and in general in post-diploma training offers. Already in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, out of the total of 1.721.914 university students there was an increase of 70.000 more students than the previous year, net of turnover between graduates and freshmen. A trend in line with the always positive results of the last five years and enriched by the increase in study courses aimed at an international audience, similarly to the number of students enrolled from abroad which registered a +14,7% in 2020, for a total of 16.514 freshmen compared to 14.393 in 2016. Also this year, according to the first results of the Open Days, the trend is for an increasing participation, which follows the real explosion of the offer: today in Italy there are about 98 state, private and telematic universities.
However, despite the desire to return to normality, the online formula was confirmed for the Open Days, now considered safer and more inclusive (and not just the Open Days: according to the AlmaLaurea report, now one in five students, especially freshmen, prefers also online lessons). The community makes this mode agile and participatory Docsity, founded in Turin in 2011 by Riccardo Ocleppo and which more and more universities and higher education schools are turning to for the organization and management of orientation Open Days dedicated to secondary school students. The network, which was born as a space for students to exchange educational materials, has since the beginning of the pandemic become a platform for promoting the training offers of the main higher education institutions. Today it has over 15 million subscribers worldwide, of which 2,5 million in Italy, and has already set up around 50 Digital Open Days in the last year, which was attended by 50 students.
The need to attract new students is an issue that has an important impact on universities, in the face of constant growth in the university population, as represented in the "Report on the university system" published in May by the Court of Auditors. Docsity has a very international catchment area and has been able to reach high school graduates from every region of the world, also thanks to unew mode of Open Day: in fact, the appreciation of users for the use of content has grown on demand, which goes beyond the time limit of live events and guarantees greater flexibility and coverage.
The level of digital competence of future graduates has certainly encouraged the online transposition of situations previously experienced in an analogical way, but the process has not always been easy and automatic. "Docsity has been a point of reference for students and institutions in this complicated period - he comments with FIRSTonline the founder Riccardo Ocleppo -. We have worked a lot in the last year to improve the user experience and guarantee our users continuity with services and experiences that they were accustomed to experiencing physically before the pandemic. We have transformed limits into resources, overcoming certain boundaries of space and time thanks to the network".
