Italy

This course introduces students to public management, i.e., the decisions and actions of public officials in managerial roles. At the end of the course, students understand how a public manager achieves, in an effective way, at all levels of government, the goals of public policies. Course topics include an introduction to management; private versus public management; performance management in the public sector; the new public management and the public governance; citizen engagement; the creation and co-creation of public value; collaborative governance in times of uncertainty; strategic planning in the public sector: processes and tools; the strategic thinking: meaning and underlying variables; how to create an effective strategic plan; and a comparative study on international strategic plans.

This course includes laboratory experience and discusses various paradigms and phenomena related to different aspects of human cognition. The course discusses topics related to experiments including the ability to understand the aims and the experimental design underlying an experimental paradigm used to study a given phenomenon; the ability to evaluate both internal and ecological validity in a given experimental paradigm; the ability to identify the weaknesses underlying a given experimental paradigm; and the ability to accurately interpret the meaning of the results of an experiment. The course begins with methodological issues related to experimental psychology and works its way up from lower-level perceptual aspects of cognition, such as vision and object recognition, and then on to higher-level cognitive abilities. The phenomena that are illustrated and discussed are, among others, perceptual effects, the pop-out effect, the Simon effect, the Stroop effect, and also more recent phenomena illustrating how the cognitive system reacts to social signals and experimental settings with high ecological validity. Effort is made to keep theory and lab practice in parallel. Basic methodological aspects underlying the different experimental paradigms is also given strong emphasis. The course illustrates the relationship between the different effects investigated in the lab with the way cognitive processes are used in real life. The course requires students to have basic knowledge in cognitive psychology and methodology in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience as a prerequisite.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 152B and Bologna course number 93217, is associated with the LM in Geography and Territorial Processes degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 152A and Bologna course number 90543, is associated with the LM in Sociology and Social Work degree programme.

At the end of the course, students are able to: have a general overview of international migrations, their main interpretative models, and some related issues; and manage the main concepts for the study of migrations, without limiting to the classic economy and the demography ones, but paying attention also to some most recent approaches. The course provides the main conceptual and analytical tools for a sociological analysis of migrations, presenting the most accredited interpretation models, the most recent trends, and the social impact of this phenomenon in the Mediterranean area. The first part of this course considers the figure of the stranger and the interaction models with society as it emerges from the classical sociological debate (Simmel, Park, Thomas). The second part introduces the contemporary debate on international migrations and the interpretation models of this phenomenon from different disciplines. Special attention is given to: 1. theoretical contributions from the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s; 2. considering migrations as a "total social fact," according to the Algerian sociologist A. Sayad; and 3. interethnic and cohabitation relations in urban settings. During the Laboratory experts and workers of the socio-sanitary field present their professional experience, in order to enlarge the debate with students about the main issues of the course of sociology of migrations.

The Pre-A1 Italian language course is the first contact level students have with the language, it is suggested to learners who could have great difficulties because they speak non-European languages or a very different language from Italian. In this level students learn how to communicate in daily routine using fixed expressions. The course consists of discussing communicative functions including introducing oneself and talking about oneself (name, age, university study, nationality, address, place of living, mobile phone number); saying and asking for personal information; greeting and answering greetings; saying thanks and replying; apologizing and replying to apologies; looking for and asking for information in daily life (place to go to, price and cost); asking and saying the time; asking and saying the date; being formal and informal; asking and understanding information about the Italian language: What's the Italian for "x"?, How do you spell "x"?, What does "x" mean?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the first disciplines of Digital Marketing. It changes a lot over the years, switching from keyword-based logic to search intent answers. It is important to know all the fundamentals: words used, international scenario, the evolution of Search Engines, and the ranking factors. Since Google is the most used Search Engine in most of the world, all the topics covered in the course are based on Google guidelines. The course discovers the most impactful activities that can help websites to have success on Google, divided by: technical, internal, and external. The course examines how to build an informational architecture, and students work on a fashion web project, discovering how to approach the work and solve problems an SEO specialist would meet. With the help of Advertising, User Experience, Conversion Rate Optimization, Email Marketing and Web Analytics, SEO can express its real potential. The course demonstrates how the Digital Marketing initiatives can help each other to have the best opportunity to success online. There are other platforms where one can do SEO, such as YouTube, Pinterest, MyBusiness, and Amazon. The course explores the common points within Google SEO and others, to see how companies can take advantage of them. The course discusses topics including the basic of Search Engine Optimization; ranking factors for Google; the evolution of SEO; how to build a website informational architecture; SEO techniques, on site and off site and some tools to be used; how SEO can help other digital initiatives and vice versa (Advertising, User Experience, Email Marketing, etc.), how to do SEO, not only on Google; and how to track the results.

This course introduces students to the concepts of financial risks and to the techniques used to manage those risks using financial derivatives. After showing how to measure risk and its impact on the firm’s business, the course illustrates the functioning of derivatives, such as forward and futures, swaps and options, and their use to hedge financial risks.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides an overview of the main actors and institutions of the Italian political system. The course analyses the function of major institutions (such as the parliament, government, and constitutional court) and interprets the institutional and political changes of recent decades. The course offers conceptual tools for framing and interpreting the many dimensions of the Italian political system. A first brief history examines the construction of the unified state, and the continuities and discontinuities between the liberal, Fascist, and democratic republican regimes. The course then focuses on the reasons for and consequences of the transition from the first to the second republic. This is followed by study of the electoral arena and evolution of the party system in parallel with discussion of Italian political culture. The latter part of the course, in the form of seminars, is dedicated to the topic of populism and the link between ethnos (community identity) and democratic values.

This course discusses the main neuropsychological syndromes and the neuropsychological profile of the main neurological and psychiatric diseases. The course explores topics including an introduction to clinical neuropsychology and neuropsychological assessment; neurology and neuroradiology for neuropsychologists; cognitive deficits and neuropsychological syndromes in neurological disorders; neurodegenerative diseases, dementia, and its risk and protective factors; and neuropsychological profile in psychiatric disorders. The course requires students to have a basic understanding of concepts from psychobiology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology as a prerequisite.

This course discusses the most relevant experimental paradigms for the investigation of conscious perception and its failures. The course discusses topics including notions concerning how the sensory apparatus in human adults selects and organizes the flood of information into coherent and perceivable objects; notions concerning the lively debate about the role of attention as a gate to consciousness; notions about extant functional, neural, and computational models of consciousness; and notions about human error as resulting from a failure at one of more processing stages underlying the generation of a conscious percept, considering a subset of situations in which such errors may engender in particularly problematic situations. The course requires students to have the basic notions typically delivered in classes such as Experimental/General Psychology, and the basic principles for the use of experimental methodologies in the psychological field as a prerequisite.

This is a service-learning based project promoted by the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology in cooperation with the Projects and Mobility Office and it is designed for exchange students staying at the University of Padova for the entire academic year or spring semester. Students on this service-learning course participate in the program called Erasmus@School. Service-learning is an experiential educational method in which students engage in community service, reflect critically on this experience, and learn from it personally, socially, and academically. Students are involved in activities such as theater labs, foreign language learning, and science labs in a primary (six-10-year-olds) and secondary (11–13-year-olds) school in Padova. The course is graded pass/no pass only.