The Future of Education

The development of information technologies over the last ten years has been the major cause of changes in the contemporary globalised society and reciprocally in higher education. E-learning and distance education have attracted the attention both of the Bulgarian politicians and the academic community who recognise it as an opportunity for the educational system to meet learners’ needs and enhance its own competitiveness. Over the past 2 years the government has invested 30 million BGN from European Structural Funds into the implementation of distance education at Bulgarian universities. A number of universities are approbating a variety of approaches for transforming traditional courses into blended and online courses; lecturers are being trained in effective models and strategies for online teaching.

Assuring the quality of the learning experience and results in this mass implementation is a key factor for the success of this national initiative. This paper examines the quality of online courses design and implementation from the perspectives of the students involved in different forms of distance learning.

The paper presents the experience of Bulgaria’s biggest and oldest university – Sofia University in implementation of distance education. The research is part of a large-scale project: Capacity Improvement of the Academic Staff in Sofia University Educational Specialties for design and provision of quality distance education, funded by European Structural Funds and encompasses all university education specialties and faculties.

Over 90 lecturers have been trained in traditional courses redesign into electronic format which resulted in 100 courses being transformed. The online courses were approbated with over 800 full-time and part-time students from 1 Bachelor and 3 Masters Programmes. The pilot testing was conducted with students from the education faculties and specialties at Sofia University.

Courses differ in terms of number of students, contents, duration, and ratio between online and in-person attended sessions.

The research paper aims to classify the designed and piloted courses by the model developed by Jara and Mohamed (2007)  which creates a typology of educational models for possible solutions about the integration of technologies in teaching and learning.

It is our aim to typologise the online courses at Sofia University in order to find the best solution for use of a distance form of learning in accordance with the needs of the learners.

The survey conducts a comparative analysis of education-design models, on the one hand, and the students’ attitude and evaluation of the type and the kinds of combining of online and in-person sessions, on the other.

[1 ] M. Jara and F. Mohamed (2007). Pedagogical templates for e-learning, WLE Centre Occasional Papers in Work-based Learning 2, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, London, www.wlecentre.ac.uk