PNRRorienta: A Web Application for Managing Schools, Courses, and Students Involved in the PNRR Orientation Initiative

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) allocates funds to universities for participating in an initiative for delivering orientation courses to students in the last three years of secondary education. The University of Padua is among the institutions joining this initiative. The main objective of these courses is to help students understand the significance of higher education and its value to society. These courses also provide students with an opportunity to explore different educational offerings. Additionally, students can gain practical experience in active and laboratory-based disciplinary teaching, consolidate their knowledge, and develop reflective and transversal skills. Finally, students can also get an overview of various employment sectors and potential job prospects. However, this initiative requires a big effort to plan all the lectures and manage the huge amount of students, institutes, courses, and professors involved. Therefore, in this work we present a Web application, called PNRRorienta, we have designed and developed to manage and simplify all the tasks related to this initiative. The University of Padua has started to use this application in September 2023 and, as of February 2024, it handles more than 70 different secondary education institutes in the Veneto Region, almost 200 courses offered to students, more than 1,300 lectures, more than 400 professors, and almost 10,000 students actively enrolled.