Best wishes for the spring semester from the Pro-Rector's for Education and Students' Experience

Today is the third day of the spring semester. We take this opportunity to renew our wishes to our academic community through the open letter that the Pro-Rector for Education and Students' Experience, Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni, has addressed to all faculty members of our University: 

Dear colleague,

I would like to take the opportunity of this newsletter by eLab, a very important service to the quality of teaching at USI, to introduce myself and to wish you a very fruitful activity at the service of our students.

Based on a proposal by our Rector, last October the University Council has established the role of Pro-Rector for Education and Students’ Experience. By doing so, it has stressed how important it is for the whole USI the educational mandate.

One of my tasks is to further harmonise and improve the Bachelor's and Master's programmes offered at USI; moreover, I am in charge of overseeing the students’ experience, so as to make their studies at USI even more interesting and full of opportunities for growth.

In these first months, I have had the chance to meet many colleagues, as well as student representatives and representatives of their associations. I’ve also met several PhD candidates involved in teaching activities, who have taken part in the Academic Teaching course, and future colleagues from the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, participating in the Teach the Teacher training course. For these activities, I have collaborated with Dr. Stefano Tardini, Executive director of eLab, and with Dr. Marilu Guigli Poretti.

eLab, the eLearning Lab of USI, is a very important resource we have as instructors. Not only does it manage the iCorsi platform, but it offers also a very responsive help service, several opportunities for refresher and retraining sessions, and a wide range of services/soft useful to improve the quality of our teaching activity.

Among the several projects underway, I would like to mention: the launch of the prospect.usi.ch platform, designed to improve the relationship with prospect students interested in our Master’s programmes; the harmonisation of the number of ECTS attributed to curricular internships; the first step towards an evidence based consideration on USI Masters’ programmes within the Academic Senate; and a more structured dialogue with the Cantonal authorities (Ufficio Insegnamento Medio Superiore) in relation to  continuing education of high school teachers.

I would like also to inform you that USI has decided to take part in the Times Higher Education European Student Survey.

Thanks to the contribution of our students, we be able to better measure and assess the position of USI position against other European universities and to further improve our services.

Thank you so much for your attention, kind regards, and have a great semester!

Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni
(Pro-Rector for Education and Students’ Experience)