Distance learning and pedagogical models: perspectives and evolutions for the education of designers.

“Teaching innovation” is nowadays a mainstream keyword in the strategies of higher education institutions, both in Europe and all over the world (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016). Even if we cannot count on a shared and mature idea of “teaching innovation”, in the last few years a growing number of researchers and practitioners are seeing it as the implementation of strategies able to transform traditional transmissive teaching practices in student-centred processes, stimulating active learning in a supportive environment, engaging students in authentic and real-life problem- solving (Brandon, 2004). This definition has been furtherly developed by suggesting that it also involves creative teaching able to foster students’ creative potential (Ferrari et al., 2009). Within this frame a wider attention is now given to methodologies to be applied in and outside the classroom: relatively recent approaches focused on active and collaborative learning, as flipped classroom, are more and more diffused (Karabulut-Ilgu et al., 2017) and a new attention to the connectivism paradigms is paid. The focus of this debate are methodologies to be applied, while a relative lower attention is paid to change management strategies. In this perspective it is interesting to notice how a great emphasis is often given to the weak motivation of teachers, perceived not as key actors, but mainly as a “problem to overcome”, basically affected by “resistance to change” (Ubell, 2016). This lack of attention to the role of teachers as engines and facilitators of the teaching innovation is particularly evident in the panorama of teaching innovation design methodologies, often evoked as strategic tools for implementing teaching innovation initiatives, where a very low attention is paid to approaches able to stimulate the teachers in being actually creative leaders of the teaching-learning innovation process. Below, it is proposed a step forward in the empowerment of teachers as learning innovation drivers, based on cross-fertilization with a very specific focus on the “design” discipline: the “design of services” (Meroni and Sangiorgi, 2011) and the “design for experiences”( Hassenzahl, 2010).