COME UW 2016 - a yearly report

„... it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" – these words found in L. Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass make up a nice summary of COME UW's activities in 2016. Apart from standard e-learning services provided for the academic community the quality of which we are constantly improving, last year we undertook new challenges and initiatives.

COME UW's fundamental task of organizing, supporting and initiating distance learning as well as enhancing academic teaching based on the use of modern technologies, is well mirrored in the following activities:     

• didactic, technical and administrative supervision over the general university courses within the IBIZA project (Interdisciplinary Database of Academic E-courses);
• technical and didcatic development of: Language E-courses (E-lektoraty), Remedial Foreign Language E-courses, Interactive Mock Foreign Language Tests preparing students for the certification exam and Placement Tests; 
• supervision over Freshmen Instructional Self-study E-trainings: Occupational Safety and Care, Library Training, and Student’s Tutorial on the use of our e-learning platform; 
• support of Faculty E-courses (providing access to virtual classes, helping e-teachers to create file repositories, to design teaching materials to be embedded on the e-learning platform, to prepare interactive tasks, tests, recordings);
• systematic individual and group trainings for academic teachers preparing them to use the Moodle platform and to design and administer e-courses with the provision of e-learning methodology (also within the celebrations of UW 200th Jubilee);
• cooperation in creating and running UW e-learning educational projects (FID projects - Teaching Innovation Fund, post-graduate studies, Foundation Year Programme);
• cooperation with the outside university institutions and initiatives (e.g. The School of Education of the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, “National Olympiad on Film and Social Communication” with Filmoteka Narodowa, E-courses of the School Film Library (Filmoteka Szkolna) with the Polish Film Institute (PISF)).

The university e-classes are hosted on a general university e-learning platform Kampus. It is intergrated with USOS and CAS (Central Authentication Service). It also meets the needs of students with disabilities and special requirements.

Below, you may find our activities expressed in numbers:

• 11,5 mln user loggings into the Kampus platform (2,5 mln more than in 2015),
• 486 faculty e-courses on the Kampus platform (360 last year),
• 33 282 active student accounts and over 451 active e-teacher accounts.

And because „progress has no greater enemy than habit” (Jose Marti), we have changed the organization and layout of COME UW's website, making it clearer and more user-friendly. The website is run in Polish and English. It also contains the training application forms and tutorials for e-teachers. Our blog is a novelty, where we publish posts and reports on the use modern technologies in didactics. You are welcome to visit it at any time...