The acronym DDLUB will be used to identify the Department for Distance Learning of the University of Bucharest, Romania. This department was established in 1999, based on the university’s Senate Decision. The University of Bucharest has been actively contributing to the development and modernization of Romanian education, science and culture. A brief chronological history is presented on the official site (http://www.unibuc.ro/e/n/despre/History.php). The important milestone was the moment when Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza decided to bring together the Faculties of Law, Sciences and Letters under the umbrella of a single institution and signed the Decree of Creation (decree no.756 of 4/16 July 1864) of the University of Bucharest.
During 2014, DDLUB celebrated 15 years of existence and the University of Bucharest celebrated 150 years of existence. DDLUB was continuously focused on promoting the digital technologies in education.
Google Corporation has released the Classroom platform on 12th August 2014. According with [1] the “Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail so teachers can create and collect assignments paperlessly”. New features were added on 10th December 2014 like archiving the closed classes.
The DDLUB has applied to obtain the statute of GAFE-Google Apps for Education for its domain “credis.ro”. In November 2014 DDLUB has started to implement the Google Classroom platform for the students enrolled with the academic classes delivered by professor Bogdan Logofatu: more than 350 students and seven classes; the study programs were at the level of Bachelor Degree (one program with 185 students) and Masteral Degree (four programs with 165 students).
The service we have found very useful is the “assignments” which is available through the main web pages of the classroom: “…within Classroom, teachers can create an assignment, use it in multiple classes, and choose how students complete the assignment (for example, whether each student receives an individual copy or all students work in the same copy of the assignment). The teacher can track who has completed the assignment and who hasn't, and provide feedback to individual students… The teacher can see the all of the grades for an assignment, and students can see their own grades for completed assignments”.
This article will present the DDLUB experience, acquired during the first semester of the academic year 2014-2015; this was the first implementation of the Google Classroom platform within higher education institution in Romania: University of Bucharest.