Table of Contents

• The challenge: knowledge that doesn’t reach people
• From a document to a course in minutes
• Human involved into the workflow
• Languages that open the door
• Matching people to the right path
• A new model for the university
• Why it matters

How Neodata’s platform powers the University of Catania’s new Centro Phygital — turning institutional knowledge into multilingual courses built to reach the people who need them most.

In March 2026, the University of Catania opened something that doesn’t look like a classroom. At the “Emilio Giardina” teaching hub of the Department of Economics and Business, the new Centro Phygital is a hybrid physical-and-digital space with one purpose: to bring training to the people most often left out of it — migrants, young people not in education or work, current and former prisoners, and women on the margins of the local economy.

Funded through the Grins project and inaugurated by the department’s director, Prof. Roberto Cellini, the center reframes what a university can be: an open educational platform that integrates outside partners, delivers personalized and modular services, and turns research into evidence-based training for entrepreneurship and social inclusion.

Behind the digital half of that “phygital” promise is a platform built by Neodata.

The challenge: knowledge that doesn’t reach people

The university and its partners generate an enormous amount of usable knowledge — research, methods, course material, the expertise of everyone involved in a project like Grins. Turning that into training is the hard part, and it gets harder when the learners you most want to reach speak different languages, start from very different backgrounds, and can’t wait weeks for a course to be written by hand.

The center needed a way to move from raw material to ready training quickly, in more than one language, and with enough oversight that the content could be trusted in a sensitive, institutional setting. That is the problem Neodata’s platform was built to solve.

From a document to a course in minutes

The platform does one deceptively simple thing. You give it a document — a PDF, a Word file, a text export — and it returns a complete course. It reads the material, builds a structure around it (chapters, objectives, key concepts), and produces the full package: interactive slides, a downloadable PowerPoint, a printable PDF, a natural-sounding audio version, and a quiz for every chapter. What used to take a specialist weeks takes minutes.

Because the same course exists at once as slides, PDF, audio and quizzes, learners meet the material in whatever way suits them — listening on the move, reading, or working through the interactive version.

Human involved into the workflow

For a center serving vulnerable groups inside a public university, speed alone isn’t enough. The content has to be right.

Using the HITL (“Human-In-The-Loop”) approach, the system asks a reviewer to approve before continuing: the objectives, the chapter text, the quiz questions, and the final production step. Oversight isn’t an add-on; it is a defined, reversible workflow. For training tied to certification, compliance or sensitive audiences, that is what makes the automation usable.

Languages that open the door

Inclusion often fails at the language barrier. Phygital generates courses in Italian, English, French and Spanish at the same time, with more available on request, and the translations run in parallel with the main course rather than after it. For a center whose learners include migrants and newcomers, multilingual delivery is the difference between a course that reaches someone and one that doesn’t.

Matching people to the right path

The center’s mission is reskilling, upskilling and entrepreneurship education — moving people toward work and independence. Phygital supports this with a skills-profiling system that reads three dimensions of each learner: their background and work preferences, their digital and language skills, and personal constraints such as mobility or family situation. Aligned with European frameworks like DigComp, that profile feeds a recommendation engine combining content matching, AI-based relevance and clustering of similar learners. The result is a path tailored to the person rather than a generic catalogue — exactly what placement-oriented training needs.

A built-in multilingual chatbot supports learners along the way, answering questions in their own language.

A new model for the university

For the people behind Grins, the center is a proof of concept for a larger idea. The digital infrastructure lets the university act as an open platform: integrating partners and external resources, enabling entrepreneurial ecosystems, and generating social impact through co-produced educational value.

That is where Neodata’s role fits. The Phygital platform is the engine that turns the center’s knowledge into training at the speed and scale inclusion work demands, in the languages its learners actually speak, with human judgment kept in the loop.

Why it matters

Technology projects are easy to describe in the abstract. This one has a concrete test: does it help a migrant, a young NEET, or someone leaving the prison system pick up a skill and a path toward work? By turning the documents an institution already produces into courses that reach people quickly and in their own language, Phygital puts that answer within reach. For Neodata, it is a clear example of what the platform was built for — knowledge made usable, in the service of people who need it.

The engine behind Phygital is Neodata’s Document Intelligence. Curious what our AI could do with your documents? Take a look.