ALUMNI NETWORK AND PEER LEARNING: EXPERIENCE OF MEDITERRANEAN AGRONOMIC INSTITUTE OF BARI

A number of higher education and training institutions promote teaching methods that enable active learning by offering trainees the opportunity to formulate questions, discuss problems, explain their points of view and use a “collaborative” approach based on teamwork for problem and project management. Peer Learning is a form of collaborative instruction that enhances the student/student interaction and leads to definitely positive learning results. This work deals with a spontaneous Peer Learning process occurring within the context of an eLearning follow-up course on “Invasive Fruit Tree Pest Surveillance in The Mediterranean Region”. This course lasting 10 weeks was addressed to 40 former trainees of the MAIB institutional Master of Science program in “Integrated Pest Management of Mediterranean Crops”, members of the Alumni Network of the Institute. In fact, within the Discussion Fora significant students contributions were posted introducing additional information and knowledge to the course contents (131 out of 907). Furthermore, the occurrence of complete cycles of different types of post “Episodes” called “dialogic cycle” in different modules of the course has shown the actual occurrence of Peer Learning. This confirms the actual trend to changes in the production/development and in the consumption/use of information and knowledge, so that the role of the student is enhanced through a new form of collaboration between peers, in which the student is a “producer of knowledge”.