Covid-19 and UNIMORE students: how the emergency changes the study and the university experience

The research report presents the results of the online survey conducted by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia on the living and study conditions of students in the period 8 April - 2 May 2020. The online survey was answered by 20% of students: an adequate participation rate to capture some significant differences between courses of study. The aim of the survey is to overcome the Covid-19 emergency with greater awareness, analysing the living and study conditions of the students and looking for the most useful tools for inclusive teaching and study that contribute to giving each student the possibility to proceed in their own study and life path in the best possible way. The questionnaire, the survey tools and the results that emerge from the multivariate analysis are presented, both for the closed-answer questions and for the openended questions, on which textual analysis techniques have been applied. The different tools and methods are presented to emphasize the specificity of the dataset, which presents a different level of variability of the answers in the different thematic areas. The report concludes with a series of considerations that we offer to the Unimore community to support the discussion on what we have learned and continue to learn thanks to the voice of the students. It is now clear that the exit from the emergency will be a gradual process. The students' point of view, which we gather from this survey, will be really valuable to plan next year's educational activities and services for students, in order to offer a high quality teaching that responds to different needs and study contexts. Further developments of the analysis may concern other in-depth studies on specific teaching methods (distance and in-presence) and on the evaluation of the living and working conditions of teaching and technical-administrative staff. The basic idea is to read, through the Covid-19 emergency lens, the essential dimensions to improve the quality of teaching highlighted by the empirical survey.