The Backstage of the First Bocconi MOOC
The small Cinecittà of via Roentgen is only a 25-sqm rectangle but every wall, as in a studio, is a backdrop. When the camera points the east wall, scattered with large orange and red sticky notes, Financing and Investing in Infrastructure is being shot; when it's directed towards north, where the wall is covered with fashion magazines' sheets, Managing Fashion and Luxury Companies is under way. The two productions are the first Massive open online courses (MOOCs) that Bocconi is going to publish on the Coursera platform, and the office turned-set is Bocconi education and teaching alliance's (BETA), the laboratory which studies and designs the future of learning at the University.
As soon as a sequence is over Stefano Gatti, the Financing and Investing in Infrastructure professor, asks the cameraman: "Time?", and is told he's right on schedule. This is the last shooting session, some ten days before the MOOC goes online on 9 June, and by now Gatti is a veteran. Before a sequence is shot Gatti discusses with BETA's Chiara Moscardo the link between the footage and the slides, and as her colleague Valentina Todaro manages the scene, Chiara fine-tunes the slides. It's a smooth mechanism, which started to move in December 2013 under the direction of Luigi Proserpio, the head of BETA.
"The first step has been the restructuring of the course into weeks, sessions and scenes", Gatti explains. "We've written a script and then a detailed screenplay and the first shootings have been a learning experience for everyone". By now the team can shoot a week of lessons in a single, half-day session.
The opening of the MOOC is an introduction shot in many, different environments, in order to make the user familiar with the look of Bocconi, but the rest of the course is almost entirely shot at the BETA. "We thought we were going to use different backgrounds", Valentina says, "but then we have observed that the background can be confusing. So we chose something colourful but relatively static and thought to reintroduce a variety of stimuli by using different situations: a frontal sequence introduces the topic of the lesson, a roundtable with questions asked by adjunct professors (today Carlo Chiarella and Gimede Gigante) goes in-depth, while some clips see the professor assigning and then solving an exercise. The last, "take away" sequence sums up what is really fundamental.
"As time went by and benchmarking the experience of others", Chiara says, "we have understood the importanceof the forums in order to create a community and discuss the contents of the course and now we are working hard on them".
During a pause, among the Java programming and the statistics for economics books contained in transparent cubes that furnish the BETA Lab, Gatti sums up: "It has been a great experience and I've learnt a lot of things, and especially how a production process works and how to adapt my teaching to different contexts". And then Valentina checks the colours and the position of the objects on Gatti's desk and gets close to it with the black clapperboard in her hands.