Didactic innovations in e-learning at the University of Warsaw

One of COME’s missions is to freely support the preparation stage of e-learning courses which are run at bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral studies. Many courses have come to life as resulting from the Teaching Innovation Fund (FID) projects. We mentioned some of them in one of the previous articles. Today, we would like to provide you with more detailed information about these courses.

In the 12th edition of the FID, we continue to cooperate with the Centre of Polish Language and Culture for foreigners POLONICUM. The outcome of this cooperation will be the “E-book: Polish as a foreign language with interactive exercises” at A1 level, targeted at students from abroad. The e-book’s modules will be supplemented with interactive exercises on an educational platform, serving as an integral part of the work with the e- book. The idea behind the e-book is not only to shape its innovative form, but also to provide students with an adventurous plot illustrating the students’ life and studying on the university campus, which in turn will tune the course participants into the local culture, help identify themselves with the characters in the story and engage them emotionally in their studies.

Recently, we have started to cooperate with the Faculty of History on the e-course devoted to the role of the royal court in modern Europe, the aim of which is to analyze the interdependence between the changes in the royal court culture and social and political phenomena.

It is worth noticing that many courses which were launched in the previous FID editions still work well on the educational platform, e.g. an “E-placement test in Polish for foreign students” helping foreign students assess their level of advancement in the Polish language and get assigned to the appropriate language class. The authors of the e-test are teachers of the Centre of Polish Language and Culture for foreigners POLONICUM.

Another interesting example is „Intellectual Property Protection in Student Life – E- learning course”, an introductory course for foreign students studying at UW. This course consists of 10 thematic chapters covering the topics like copyright law, plagiarism, brands and trademarks. Difficult and complex topics are presented in a clear, organized and challenging way. Dilemmas like “Whose is the copyright in case when a monkey stole a reporter’s camera and took a photo by accident (it was quite a nice selfie though!)?”. What is more, the course contains animated presentations accompanied by a spoken commentary as well as tutorials and tests, also prepared by COME UW in cooperation with the Institute of Political Science at the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science.

A general university course “Polish – the correct way”(created with the FID support and conducted within the IBIZA project) has maintained its popularity. Its three parts (“Spelling and punctuation”, “Grammar issues” and „Practical stylistics and text editing”) cover the basics of the correct use of the Polish language. The online courses, consisting of thematic chapters, are supervised by teachers who stimulate students’ work and their discussions in the forums.

The above mentioned courses are just a part of the didactic offer of the University of Warsaw, supported by the Teaching Innovation Fund (FID). We hope they will serve as the source of inspiration for new innovative ideas for courses using the information technology. If you have an innovative idea for an online course, we kindly invite you to cooperate with COME UW. We are ready to help you prepare involving materials, also at the stage of project planning.