In May 2025, Riccardo Ocleppo, founder of the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT), gave the audience at TEDx Parma in Italy an insight into why he created OPIT, a new type of university that is quickly becoming essential in preparing students for an increasingly technological future.
Meet Riccardo
Although Riccardo graduated from Politecnico di Torino with a bachelor’s in electronic engineering in 2006 – followed by a master’s degree in 2008 – he felt unprepared for the challenges he felt he had to face as a professional. He sought to expand his vision by completing the master’s program at the London School of Business.
While studying in London, Riccardo became focused on how he could help other students optimize their studies and ensure they were properly prepared for their futures. This resulted in the creation of Docsity, an international online community where university students could exchange study materials to prepare for exams.
Docsity has grown into a global community with 15 million registered students. Moreover, it partners with over 250 universities and business schools worldwide that interview students and provide that information to educational organizations to help them refine their offerings. This experience of working as a conduit between students and universities shaped Riccardo’s understanding of the higher education sector’s needs, eventually leading to the creation of OPIT.
The Challenges Facing Higher Education
In his TEDx talk, Riccardo asked the Parma audience to imagine themselves on their first day of university – sitting in their classroom as their professor explains the concepts that they will learn over the coming years, designed to prepare them for the future.
But, he asked, how long will the skills in your curriculum be relevant? In the past, the skills learned at university would last someone for the rest of their professional lives. But today, with technology changing faster than ever, we have reached the point where we can’t accurately predict what technologies we will be using in five years. It is even more challenging, he said, to predict what kind of knowledge children sitting in classrooms today will need when they reach adulthood.
The inability to predict the skills that students will need in the future or adapt courses quickly enough to include those skills is why many university degrees are no longer fit for purpose, Riccardo explained. Instead, he stated, they are preparing students for a destination that will no longer exist when they graduate while pushing them over a road with a constantly moving target destination.
Building OPIT
With these challenges and his experiences from Docsity in mind, Riccardo set to work designing the kind of education he wished that he had received. He set out to create a university that would allow learners, at any stage in their career, to adapt and reinvent themselves for the changing world. The result was OPIT, which matriculated its first students in 2023.
With that in mind, OPIT courses are built around three pillars.
Pillar One: Bridging Theory and Practice
Universities often produce students with excellent theoretical knowledge of a subject area but with limited ability to apply that knowledge to real-world problems. It is how Riccardo felt about his knowledge and skills when he completed his electronic engineering degree.
OPIT degrees, on the other hand, are designed to provide students with not only a strong technical foundation but also an understanding of and the ability to develop real-world applications.
The OPIT faculty, recruited from some of the world’s leading businesses, play a central role in achieving this. Instead of relying on polished case studies published years after the fact, they use real-life workplace challenges as teaching tools.
Faculty members include practitioners and thought leaders from some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Zorina Alliata, Principal AI and Generative AI Strategist at Amazon; Khaled Elbehiery, Senior Director and Network Engineer at Charter Communications; Andrea Gozzi, Head of Strategy and Partnership for the Digital Industries Ecosystem at Siemens; and Sabya Dasgupta, Lead Solution Architect at Microsoft.
For MSc programs, students complete this focus on application with the final Capstone Project, which encourages them to apply their knowledge to the real world through an industry internship.
Pillar Two: International and Multidisciplinary
As well as recruiting professors with an international and multidisciplinary profile, OPIT seeks to do the same with the cohort – people working in diverse fields and looking for ways to leverage the same technology to improve what they do. The diversity of the student profile helps break down both educational and industrial silos, encouraging multidisciplinary thinking and unexpected innovation. It can also give students a greater level of cultural awareness, which they may not have encountered before.
Courses involve online meetups between peers, allowing them to share challenges and learn through application. OPIT also hosts online events that allow students to connect with leaders from companies such as Morgan Stanley, PayPal, and Microsoft, to learn about the professional world today and forge networks for the future.
Pillar Three: Education That Fits Your Life
The third pillar of OPIT is that education should be flexible and fit into your life, rather than require you to put the rest of your life on hold to study. This is especially important for established professionals who want to adapt or reinvent themselves but don’t have the luxury of walking away from their work and other responsibilities for a few years to do so.
This is why OPIT courses are online by design – or “remote first,” as many companies brand it. This not only allows students to build study into their existing lives but also to develop experience working remotely as part of a distributed team, which are essential skills in today’s work environment.
OPIT Courses
Today, criteria such as “data literacy” and “comfortable working with AI” are often at the top of job descriptions. With these and other necessary skills in mind, OPIT launched with a BSc in Modern Computer Science and an MSc in Applied Data Science and AI.
Since then, they have also initiated a BSc in Digital Business and MSc degrees in Digital Business and Innovation, Responsible Artificial Intelligence, and Enterprise Cybersecurity. The first cohort of students celebrated their graduation ceremony on March 8, 2025.
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From the same author
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- Times of Malta, published on September 18th, 2025
4 min read
The gathering brought together academics and technology leaders from prominent European Institutions, such as Instituto de Empresa (IE University), OPIT itself and the Royal College of Arts, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the university experience.
The OPIT AI Copilot has been trained on the institute’s complete academic archive, a collection created over the past three years that includes 131 courses, more than 3,500 hours of recorded lectures, 7,500 study resources, 320 certified assessments, and thousands of exercises and original learning documents.
Unlike generic AI tools, the Copilot is deeply integrated with OPIT’s learning management system, allowing it to track each student’s progress and provide tailored support.
This integration means the assistant can reference relevant sources within the learning environment, adapt to the student’s stage of study, and ensure that unreleased course content remains inaccessible.
A mobile app is also scheduled for release this autumn, that will allow students to download exercise and access other tools.
During examinations, the Copilot automatically switches to what the institute calls an “anti-cheating mode”, restricting itself to general research support rather than providing direct answers.
For OPIT’s international community of 500 students from nearly 100 countries, many of whom balance studies with full-time work, the ability to access personalised assistance at any time of day is a key advantage.
“Eighty-five per cent of students are already using large language models in some way to study,” said OPIT founder and director Riccardo Ocleppo. “We wanted to go further by creating a solution tailored to our own community, reflecting the real experiences of remote learners and working professionals.”
Tool aims to cut correction time by 30%
The Copilot will also reduce administrative burdens for faculty. It can help grade assignments, generate new educational materials, and create rubrics that allow teachers to cut correction time by as much as 30 per cent.
According to OPIT, this will free up staff to dedicate more time to teaching and direct student engagement.
At the Milan event, Rector Francesco Profumo underlined the broader implications of AI in higher education. “We are in the midst of a deep transformation, where AI is no longer just a tool: it is an environment that radically changes how we learn, teach, and create,” he said.
“But it is not a shortcut. It is a cultural, ethical, and pedagogical challenge, and to meet it we must have the courage to rethink traditional models and build bridges between human and artificial intelligence.”
OPIT was joined on stage by representatives from other leading institutions, including Danielle Barrios O’Neill of the Royal College of Art, who spoke about the role of AI in art and creativity, and Francisco Machin of IE University, who discussed applications in business and management education.
OPIT student Asya Mantovani, also employed at a leading technology and consulting firm in Italy, gave a first-hand account of balancing professional life with online study.
The assistant has been in development for the past eight months, involving a team of OPIT professors, researchers, and engineers.
Ocleppo stressed that OPIT intends to make its AI innovations available beyond its own institution. “We want to put technology at the service of higher education,” he said.
“Our goal is to develop solutions not only for our own students, but also to share with global institutions eager to innovate the learning experience in a future that is approaching very quickly.”
Read the articleFrom personalization to productivity: AI at the heart of the educational experience.
Click this link to read and download the e-book.
At its core, teaching is a simple endeavour. The experienced and learned pass on their knowledge and wisdom to new generations. Nothing has changed in that regard. What has changed is how new technologies emerge to facilitate that passing on of knowledge. The printing press, computers, the internet – all have transformed how educators teach and how students learn.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next game-changer in the educational space.
Specifically, AI agents have emerged as tools that utilize all of AI’s core strengths, such as data gathering and analysis, pattern identification, and information condensing. Those strengths have been refined, first into simple chatbots capable of providing answers, and now into agents capable of adapting how they learn and adjusting to the environment in which they’re placed. This adaptability, in particular, makes AI agents vital in the educational realm.
The reasons why are simple. AI agents can collect, analyse, and condense massive amounts of educational material across multiple subject areas. More importantly, they can deliver that information to students while observing how the students engage with the material presented. Those observations open the door for tweaks. An AI agent learns alongside their student. Only, the agent’s learning focuses on how it can adapt its delivery to account for a student’s strengths, weaknesses, interests, and existing knowledge.
Think of an AI agent like having a tutor – one who eschews set lesson plans in favour of an adaptive approach designed and tweaked constantly for each specific student.
In this eBook, the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) will take you on a journey through the world of AI agents as they pertain to education. You will learn what these agents are, how they work, and what they’re capable of achieving in the educational sector. We also explore best practices and key approaches, focusing on how educators can use AI agents to the benefit of their students. Finally, we will discuss other AI tools that both complement and enhance an AI agent’s capabilities, ensuring you deliver the best possible educational experience to your students.
-
Go to all authors
Related posts
Source:
- Times of Malta, published on September 18th, 2025
4 min read
The gathering brought together academics and technology leaders from prominent European Institutions, such as Instituto de Empresa (IE University), OPIT itself and the Royal College of Arts, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the university experience.
The OPIT AI Copilot has been trained on the institute’s complete academic archive, a collection created over the past three years that includes 131 courses, more than 3,500 hours of recorded lectures, 7,500 study resources, 320 certified assessments, and thousands of exercises and original learning documents.
Unlike generic AI tools, the Copilot is deeply integrated with OPIT’s learning management system, allowing it to track each student’s progress and provide tailored support.
This integration means the assistant can reference relevant sources within the learning environment, adapt to the student’s stage of study, and ensure that unreleased course content remains inaccessible.
A mobile app is also scheduled for release this autumn, that will allow students to download exercise and access other tools.
During examinations, the Copilot automatically switches to what the institute calls an “anti-cheating mode”, restricting itself to general research support rather than providing direct answers.
For OPIT’s international community of 500 students from nearly 100 countries, many of whom balance studies with full-time work, the ability to access personalised assistance at any time of day is a key advantage.
“Eighty-five per cent of students are already using large language models in some way to study,” said OPIT founder and director Riccardo Ocleppo. “We wanted to go further by creating a solution tailored to our own community, reflecting the real experiences of remote learners and working professionals.”
Tool aims to cut correction time by 30%
The Copilot will also reduce administrative burdens for faculty. It can help grade assignments, generate new educational materials, and create rubrics that allow teachers to cut correction time by as much as 30 per cent.
According to OPIT, this will free up staff to dedicate more time to teaching and direct student engagement.
At the Milan event, Rector Francesco Profumo underlined the broader implications of AI in higher education. “We are in the midst of a deep transformation, where AI is no longer just a tool: it is an environment that radically changes how we learn, teach, and create,” he said.
“But it is not a shortcut. It is a cultural, ethical, and pedagogical challenge, and to meet it we must have the courage to rethink traditional models and build bridges between human and artificial intelligence.”
OPIT was joined on stage by representatives from other leading institutions, including Danielle Barrios O’Neill of the Royal College of Art, who spoke about the role of AI in art and creativity, and Francisco Machin of IE University, who discussed applications in business and management education.
OPIT student Asya Mantovani, also employed at a leading technology and consulting firm in Italy, gave a first-hand account of balancing professional life with online study.
The assistant has been in development for the past eight months, involving a team of OPIT professors, researchers, and engineers.
Ocleppo stressed that OPIT intends to make its AI innovations available beyond its own institution. “We want to put technology at the service of higher education,” he said.
“Our goal is to develop solutions not only for our own students, but also to share with global institutions eager to innovate the learning experience in a future that is approaching very quickly.”
From personalization to productivity: AI at the heart of the educational experience.
Click this link to read and download the e-book.
At its core, teaching is a simple endeavour. The experienced and learned pass on their knowledge and wisdom to new generations. Nothing has changed in that regard. What has changed is how new technologies emerge to facilitate that passing on of knowledge. The printing press, computers, the internet – all have transformed how educators teach and how students learn.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next game-changer in the educational space.
Specifically, AI agents have emerged as tools that utilize all of AI’s core strengths, such as data gathering and analysis, pattern identification, and information condensing. Those strengths have been refined, first into simple chatbots capable of providing answers, and now into agents capable of adapting how they learn and adjusting to the environment in which they’re placed. This adaptability, in particular, makes AI agents vital in the educational realm.
The reasons why are simple. AI agents can collect, analyse, and condense massive amounts of educational material across multiple subject areas. More importantly, they can deliver that information to students while observing how the students engage with the material presented. Those observations open the door for tweaks. An AI agent learns alongside their student. Only, the agent’s learning focuses on how it can adapt its delivery to account for a student’s strengths, weaknesses, interests, and existing knowledge.
Think of an AI agent like having a tutor – one who eschews set lesson plans in favour of an adaptive approach designed and tweaked constantly for each specific student.
In this eBook, the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) will take you on a journey through the world of AI agents as they pertain to education. You will learn what these agents are, how they work, and what they’re capable of achieving in the educational sector. We also explore best practices and key approaches, focusing on how educators can use AI agents to the benefit of their students. Finally, we will discuss other AI tools that both complement and enhance an AI agent’s capabilities, ensuring you deliver the best possible educational experience to your students.
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