The approbation of the first certified distance course for pedagogical qualification of the academic staff of the University was launched today. The course has been conducted for four years but until now it did not involve distance learning. The first lecturers who are going to take part in the distance course are the lecturers from Veliko Tarnovo Affiliate of MU-Varna.
The total duration of the course is 8 weeks. It is divided into six working sessions. Each of them includes a summary of the lecture, multimedia presentation and individual course work. The course finishes with a methodological development of a practical lesson, and the graduates receive a Certificate of Initial Pedagogical Competence (Level I).
The training is intended for postgraduate qualification for non-habilitated academic staff, which includes lecturers, assistant professors and chief assistant professors, with a permanent employment contract at Medical University - Varna, as well as medical professionals (without pedagogical qualification), working at clinics that are accredited to train students and postgraduate students across the country.
The course is mandatory for the lecturers of MU-Varna, and it will be implemented through the Blackboard system. As a function it belongs to the Department of Research and Career Development. The course was developed and will be conducted by Assoc. Prof. Marinela Grudeva, PhD, a specialist in Pedagogics, in cooperation with the Center for e-Learning and Distance Learning and IT Center of MU-Varna.
Its main objective is to create initial pedagogic competence in non-habilitated academic staff, with no or minimum teaching experience (0 to 5 years), to master and apply the knowledge of basic educational concepts, organizing and conducting practical exercises at the higher school, skills for recognizing, identifying and characterizing the specific aspects of the process of learning at the higher medical school, individual structuring and developing the methodology of each particular lesson, as well as competence for orientation in the specifics of training at the higher medical school and implementation of the methodological requirements for taxonomy of the educational objectives.
The course is conducted in a distance, individual and independent form of training, where current control is conducted through doing tests and development of didactic tasks.
