The Future of Education

The acronym DDLUB will be used to identify the Department for Distance (DL) Learning within University of Bucharest, Romania. DDLUB started the activity 15 years ago and the main focus was on designing, implementing and development of the DL system of education within University of Bucharest. Currently, DDLUB has BA and MA study programs running as DL, acrredited by the Romanian Agency of Quality Assurance in Romania (ARACIS). One particular aspect of the DDLUB activity, during these 15 years, was the use of digital technologies in order to support the specific DL activities having as actors the students and the department’s staff. In this respect, early in 2003, eLearning technologies as well as virtual campus were implemented. During this period, 1999-2013, all these digital technologies helped the department to maintain the ARACIS DL standards of quality.

Meanwhile, new digital technologies became available and the decision makers of the department took them into consideration. The DDLUB decided to use to opportunity to use (free of charge for education) the platforms Google Apps in order to support the communication (synchronous and asynchronous) and collaboration with DL students. This article will present our experience / practice in using Google Apps as a free Learning Management System (LMS). This LMS includes: Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Documents /Drive, Google Groups, Google Plus,  Google Hangout, YouTube etc.

We performed tests on Google Course Builder platform in order to deliver online courses to the students..

Our choice was to use Google Plus as social network for academic activities (collaborative learning) and to leave Facebook to be used for personal students’ needs and preferences (the are 7,000,000 RO accounts on Facebook for 20,000,000 population - January 2014).

From technological point of view, all these were possible because the Internet has good speed in Romania and because almost all the students have personal computers (notebooks, tablets and smartphones) and Internet access. DDLUB has laboratories equipped with modern computers and with tablets and chromebooks (very soon!).

The tests performed during the first semester of the academic year 2013-2014 will allow us to move forward in the direction of extensively use of Google Apps in education, within DDLUB, starting with February 17^th, 2014. Early, in March 2014, the first two online courses will be offered to DL students and to the full-time on-campus students (as an alternative to traditional face-to-face education)