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In recent years, Italian universities have been called upon to experiment with innovative processes and changes that have involved different aspects. This contribution focuses in particular on the factors related to teaching that influence the design of university settings, characterized by student's profile evolution,  the pervasiveness of the media and the ever-increasing demand to develop skills. and achieve the stated training goals are some aspects that have influenced the teaching. BYOD, inverted classroom, feedback, experience learning are considered relevant factors for the re-definition of settings for university teaching Starting from two approaches, teacher or student-centered, some scenarios that could characterize in the next decades the following university settings: the lecture hall, the small classroom in presence, the online synchronous environments and the asynchronous online environments.

Following China, the next severely affected country due to the COVID-19 epidemic was Italy. In consideration of the increasing number of infections, the government via the Ministerial Decree (DPCM) of March 2020 established various restrictive measures for the entire Italian territory, even involving the closure of schools. Hence, for the first time, the Italian school system had to adopt distance learning. The mixed methods research in this context involves a non-probabilistic sample of 6,384 secondary school teachers answering a questionnaire issued from 5 August to 1 September 2020, and 30 telephone interviews were conducted among those who had made themselves available during the compilation of the questionnaire to be contacted for the qualitative part of the research. Therefore, the answers collected in the report1 relay what happened in the second quarter of the school year from 2019 to 2020, the period of the first lockdown in Italy, through which we try to particularly understand the didactic activities implemented by teachers, the main decision maker of the choices, the assessment methods, the autonomy of teachers in managing distance learning and the teachers’ training needs.

It is well-known that learning is a field that embraces not only dedicated teaching environments, but also informal contexts: it is worth considering how much we learn from everyday situations such as exchanges with family and friends, travel and surfing the Web. This paper aims to study the Facebook pages of two Italian professional communities "Orizzonte Scuola" and "La Scuola che Funziona". It wants to understand how necessary, in our case studies, Facebook spaces are for professional development and informal learning. We adopted a quali-quantitative research methodology: 20 structured interviews were conducted to members and founders of the spaces and a communication analysis was made of the posts published on the Facebook wall. The results revealed some interesting topics such as: members' perceptions of informal learning, strengths and weaknesses of online spaces, "depth" of communication and other professional topics.