'Stay Home, Be Safe, and Be Kind': University of Auckland's Italian Course Goes Online in a Week

On March 23rd, at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), all lectures were suspended for a week. During this time, both students and staff made a considerable effort to prepare the online delivery of courses. In this chapter we discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the Italian beginners courses offered in Semester 1. With no certainty of when the campus would reopen, and with the well-being of students always considered as a priority, the courses were quickly adapted for distance learning. This change involved multiple aspects and the experience gained, denoted by urgency and flexibility, proving to be a precious resource to face the second semester and, above all, a less predictable and more frightening future; in which not only safety and adaptability, but kindness and mutual respect, should also be the keywords. Designing blended, easily migratable online courses that make use of both technology and up-to-date approaches to language teaching has emerged as a viable strategy for an uncertain future. [For the complete volume, "The World Universities' Response to COVID-19: Remote Online Language Teaching," see ED614006.]