As a result of an agreement between Oracle Academy and Civicamente in Italy, as of March 1, 2026, 5,816 students have registered under 433 classes from 240 different schools touse Oracle Academy on the online platform “Educazione Digitale” (Digital Education). This platform officially has been recognized by the Italian Ministry of Education and Development.
Students use digital tools every day to communicate, look up information, share content, and move between platforms and services. However, being comfortable with these tools does not always mean truly understanding the systems that make the digital world possible.
This poses a significant challenge for schools. Today, supporting and educating youth cannot just be about discussing innovation or new careers. We need to create opportunities for students to explore the logic, languages, and processes behind the digital environments they already use.
Developing tech skills, then, means equipping students with valuable tools to make sense of the world around them. Learning how data is organized, how to search for information, and how web applications are developed provides essential knowledge and skills they can use in both education and future decisions. This is the aim of Oracle Academy—Oracle’s free philanthropic educational program—which offers curriculum on data, database management, and web applications to help the next generation build a deeper understanding of the systems that surround them.
Digital skills as a guidance tool
Digital skills can serve as a genuine means of guidance when schools address them in a structured and comprehensive manner. On the one hand, there are technical digital skills that are tangible and observable, such as working with data, understanding the logic of databases, and using languages and tools that underpin many modern digital environments. On the other hand, equally important are transversal skills like problem-solving, collaboration, adaptability to new tools, and the ability to apply what is learned in different contexts.
The European DigComp framework advocates for a broad concept of digital competence, which encompasses not just the practical use of tools, but also information management, content creation, and the ability to act critically and consciously. In school-work training programs in Italy, this combination is particularly valuable: guidance is not limited to informing students about emerging professions, but also helps them test their interests, aptitudes, and abilities through meaningful activities. From this perspective, technologies become a context in which to better observe the present and start to imagine their future educational and professional pathways.
Bringing accessible and practical tech skills into the classroom
For digital skills to become genuinely educational, schools must have the right tools to impart them in a tangible way. For many teachers, the challenge lies not so much in recognizing the relevance of topics such as data, databases or web applications, but in finding pathways that make them accessible for teaching, aligned with the school context, and sustainable in daily practice.
This highlights a clear need: guided, well-designed, and immediately applicable solutions that do not require building everything from scratch, and that enable work on current skills even without a strictly technical background. Approaches like these help teachers integrate innovative content into their planning, create meaningful guidance experiences, and make the connection between school learning and changes in the world of work more visible. If these experiences are also traceable, certified, and designed for flexible use, they become even more valuable for teaching practice.
Oracle Academy offers a concrete opportunity to develop tech skills
As a free technology education program focused on career-ready skills, Oracle Academy offers curriculum and resources focused on data, database management, and web applications. What makes these resources particularly appealing for educators and their students are that they transform concepts often regarded as highly specialized into a guided, gradual, and hands-on experience that is easily accessible even for beginners, and builds on knowledge and skills. Learning is structured around a self-guided e-learning module, featuring seven in-depth units, ongoing quizzes, supplementary resources, and certification of 16 hours of school-to-work learning (FSL for Italian students) for students who complete the course requirements within the platform’s deadlines.
A standout feature of Oracle Academy is its structure. Students are not just presented with information about the digital world—they are actively guided through its essential languages: organizing information into structured or relational data, using SQL commands, querying tables, and developing web applications with Oracle APEX. Lessons alternate between video lectures and practical workshops, taking learners from an introduction to Oracle Database and Oracle APEX, to creating a basic application, and eventually to developing data management tools and customizing navigation pages.
For teachers, Oracle Academy offers a ready-made, pedagogically clear resource, allowing them to bring current technology learning content into their teaching without the need to develop a technical framework from scratch. For students, this offers a tangible opportunity to gain skills that are already relevant in today’s digital workplace, and to do so in a way that is approachable yet genuinely instructive.
From data to web applications: What do students really learn?
One of the most interesting aspects of the course is that it makes accessible concepts which, at school, often risk remaining abstract or confined to theory. With Oracle Academy resources, students take practical steps: they discover what structured data and the relational model are, learn to use basic commands to query a database, and experience the step-by-step construction of an application.
Educationally, this means enabling students to observe how a crucial part of the contemporary digital world operates. Working with databases, queries, and web application navigation pages helps develop precision, logical thinking, problem-solving skills, and greater awareness of the systems they use every day. This learning offers an important initial experience with real programming languages, tools, and processes—strengthening both learning and the students’ ability to make informed choices about their future.
There is another important advantage: the progressive structure of modules make them accessible even for those approaching these topics for the first time. Each unit is linked to a quiz, and access to the next lesson is permitted only after passing the previous test, fostering gradual, structured, and easily monitored learning. For teachers, this simplifies tracking the class’s progress; for students, it provides a structured experience combining autonomy, practice, and consolidation.
In this way, Oracle Academy gives teachers a robust means to help students build contemporary technology skills in a concrete, guided, and career-oriented way. For students, it is an opportunity to grow both knowledge and confidence in the digital world.
Not a member? Join now. Learn more at academy.oracle.com.