Digital Scholarship and faculty development: for professional development in the university context

The technological tools and the logic of networking have brought important changes in the classical formats of communication and for several years they have also innovated the university system through digitization processes that concern the services offered, academic research, and teaching and learning processes. These transformations have often encountered resistance; indeed, infrastructures and government strategies that manage and promote the presence of technology in educational institutions" (external process), their pedagogical use is entrusted to the few academics within their disciplinary fields (internal process); this generates a "strong contrast between what digitization entails at an organizational and administrative level and what is required at an educational level for the improvement of teaching and learning". In the Italian context, despite the great impetus received by research and by institutions the digitization of university teaching has so far continued from scratch, thanks to the spread of mostly non-institutionalized good practices. The pandemic crisis caused, in fact, an acceleration of this internal and external digitization process and represented a strong break with traditional university teaching. If on the one hand, therefore, this state of emergency has introduced "a new and destabilizing element in the academic world, making the planning and intentionality of distance learning disappear", on the other, it has been a push "that has accelerated a process of change of the training offer in place for several years but which has often found resistance".In this paper, we discuss digital education in the pandemic period: from presence to distance for professional development in the university context.