News

The current state of the higher education institutions asked for certain changes in the educational process. UGD has adopted to the new situation and by using its electronic tools has managed to deal with the situation and maintain the teaching process successfully.

Most of the faculties  conduct lectures, exams, and colloquia through the Microsoft Times service successfully.The use of electronic tools through which all students are connected, the teaching and administrative staff of UGD are being used since the establishment of the University. These tools have been modernized and upgraded over time.

- We have synchronized all the user accounts from the local AD (students and the entire administrative and teaching staff). It is about more than 38000 student accounts from all 3 cycles of studies and about 1300 accounts for the teaching and administrative staff. Of all the services included in the Office 365 package, Exchange (mostly for e-mail) was the most widely used tool before the corona virus appeared. In the last 30 days, the number of users of the Teams service on a daily basis has exceeded Exchange - say the people from the IT service of UGD.

UGD has also made statistics on the use of the tools in the time of Covid-19, in order to see to what extent it is used and whether all the necessary lectures are held.

- More than 1000 Teams meeting sessions are held per week. Most of these sessions are online lectures, but Teams also hosts faculty meetings. We expect this number to increase due to the upcoming exam session. Most professors will conduct their exams through Teams. Some professors also use Forms quizzes to implement colloquia. The type of lectures varies a lot and we have lectures with several students (in some cases 1: 1), but there are also lectures in which we have reached the limit of 250 participants - say the people from UGD.

Microsoft has recognized the university's readiness to deal with the new situation and that was the reason to hold several meetings with the University officials where the more intensive cooperation with students and teaching staff was announced in order to develop certain tools that will be beneficial for the higher education and the students. Microsoft will allow over 20 vouchers for students or UGD staff to obtain Microsoft Azzure certificates, a software for Cloud Computing. Obtaining internationally recognized certifications for this software will provide an opportunity for the staff and the students to have new options for the development of higher education and easier adaptability to the upcoming trends.

This means that the cooperation between UGD and Microsoft has deepened, and other joint projects oriented towards improving the quality of education are also announced in the future.