20 000 Students from the UNWE Can Already Study Online
The largest university in Bulgaria incorporated a digital educational platform for 48 hours
After two days of working around the clock by its IT team the UNWE managed to move on to online training for all its nearly 20 000 students. It happened on 13 March several hours after an emergency state was declared in Bulgaria and the attendance lectures were suspended.
From Monday /16 March/ by Order of the Rector Prof. Dimitar Dimitrov the UNWE moved on entirely to the online non-attendance cloud training based on the product Microsoft Teams.
What happened? The university "migrated" from its physical building situated on “8thDecember” Blvd in Sofia to its new virtual home within the frameworks of unwe.bg domain. It happened due to the available Office 365 infrastructure where the electronic profiles of lecturers, students and employees of UNWE are integrated. For each discipline of various specialties there are separate virtual auditoriums in MS Teams where the students and lecturers meet through their electronic profiles. The application can be easily used on both desktop and mobile devices.
Of course, various other solutions were possible: Zoom, Google Classroom (with limited free offer in relation to the epidemiological situation), Moodle, even YouTube, Facebook, Skype. However, the UNWE chose MS Teams in order of integrated solution of the problem on the basis of the available electronic infrastructure. In addition, the possibilities of this application for teaching and student work are extremely wide - to the extent of a full digital experience for working in an auditorium: sharing desktops and spaces, files, joint work on them, taking control over student computer, even delivering and discussing a presentation by a student to the whole group. And all this - integrated with the e-mails and calendars of students at the UNWE.
After the successful tests carried out on Saturday and Sunday, as of today, through the digital platform lecturers and students have already completely moved on to online training. The INWE IT specialists made it possible to have buttons in the schedule and lecturing calendars for direct access to the respective virtual auditoriums for the lecturers and their students. As of this week, the first online lectures and exercises have already been taking place.
The UNWE academic community managed to prove in practice the deep meaning of the Chinese proverb saying that "any crisis is an opportunity". 20 000 students and 1 000 teachers showed full mobilization and energy and succeeded to move on to online mode of education in just one weekend.
As one of the UNWE professors wrote: “We have achieved the unattainable: a complete migration to the online #unwebg campus with ready virtual auditoriums for the university having the largest number of students. On such a scale and with such speed, we are the Pioneers in Bulgaria".
