What is an educational platform?

The educational platform is an interactive tool dedicated to the distant teaching and learning. In 2004, the University of Warsaw deployed an open source Moodle platform which is constantly being developed by the Centre for Open and Multimedia Education (COME) in order to meet didactic requirements of the academic staff and students. The Moodle platform has  successfully replaced COME’s own e-learning tool developed since 1999.

UW students take part in university e-learning classes via the COME’s platform (http://kampus.come.uw.edu.pl/). They can participate in courses conducted entirely online (except for the in-class final test), such as a general university e-course "Brain – a mysterious cosmos", "About the Polish language for non-Polonists non-Polish scholars" or "Interactive and traditional museums”. There are also courses run in a blended learning mode and  are implemented partly in the classroom and partly the remote way – students may get access to them anywhere and anytime (for example B1-C1 language e-courses). Freshmen take the mandatory self-study courses on Library Training and Health and Safety Training . There are also numerous repositories of course materials, i.e online shared spaces from which students can download files made accessible by the lecturer on the platform, needed for stationary classes.

On the platform, students can get acquainted with the materials in the form of text files (scripts for classes, excerpts of source texts), multimedia animations, audio or video recordings (e.g. parts of lectures) and deal with the course content by taking interesting individual tasks and group assignments. Some types of exercises (e.g. quiz) allow for immediate feedback on the result. This automatic assessment  undoubtedly facilitates the teacher’s work. In other activities, e.g. different types of open tasks students are required to send the results of their work to the teacher via the platform (e.g. essays, term papers, projects). In turn, a workshop or a wiki allow for teamwork. One of the most commonly used activities on the platform are forums within which teachers and students hold discussions on class topics and themes.

COME has implemented an innovative mechanism for integrating the platform with the university students’ management system USOS. Thanks to it, students do not need to create an account on the platform but simply use their university e-mail account to log in. This significantly improves the process of enrollment. The mechanism also allows for the grades transferfrom the platform to the USOS system.

The Moodle platform was developed by the Australian computer scientist Martin Dougiamas in 2002. Dougiamas’s aim was to support teachers in creating online courses, taking into account the interaction between the teacher and students, and between students themselves.