Presentation

Description

New Bulgarian University pioneered the introduction in Bulgaria of a credit system, Professional Bachelor’s, Bachelor’s and Master’s programs, distance and continuing education. The mission of New Bulgarian University is to be an autonomous liberal education institution dedicated to the advancement of university education by offering accessible and affordable opportunities for interdisciplinary and specialized education and research of high quality. Bringing its academic potential to the service of society, the University prepares its graduates for the challenges of modern democratic life cultivating critical and creative thinking, sensitivity to cultural difference, and problem‐solving. NBU provides a liberal arts education in which acquisition of knowledge and NBU prepares graduates for opportunities in the business and professional world in the following subject areas:
• Human Sciences and Humanities;
• Natural Sciences and Modern Technologies;
• Arts.professional skills is integrated with spiritual and ethical values.

Digital activity

• E-student is dedicated to students, they have access to all information regarding their program, shedule, lecturers, exams, dates, assessment etc.
• E-Prospective students: dedicated to candidate students to check online their scores, results and final results
• E-teacher- Contains information about the learning process and supports the academic activities of teachers.
• E-mail: official NBU mail for each teacher and student
• Moodle: Аn official platform in which information sources and materials related to the training process are published every day. They are divided into courses and each student can find the necessary materials for the specific course. There is a virtual classroom during Covid 19, which is only available during lecture classes and so they are held online. There is a virtual desk, microphone, video, etc.
• E-training- platform for preparation for exams related to obtaining specific certificates
• Е-library- Each student who has a card for access to the physical library of the university can use the online resources of the library and search for publications, books, textbooks useful for the learning process.

Good practice targeted

Accessibility

To go further

https://www.nbu.bg and https://azcheta.com/nbu-podkrepya-studentite-s-narusheno-zrenie/

Good practice

Support for blind students. Good practice : During Covid -19 , when distance learning is the only possible and also a challenge for faculty and students, New Bulgarian University supports blind and partially blind students across the country. The library of New Bulgarian University digitizes texts in response to orders from visually impaired students. Since the cessation of the present learning process, the "Electronic Collection for the Visually Impaired" has been enriched with 21 books or more than 6,300 pages. The specially developed digital library "Electronic Collection for the Visually Impaired" is available for registered blind users. Currently, the collection offers over 585 scientific titles in the fields of geography, linguistics, natural sciences, art, economics, information technology, history, literature, politics, law, applied sciences, religion, philosophy, medicine, psychology and education. The added titles in 2020 are 133. The electronic texts are in .txt format, which allows their reproduction by speech synthesizers via computer or mobile phone. This method of reading is among the favorites of people with visual impairments and largely replaces reading in Braille.

Starting date of the good practice

2020

Time to implement the good practice

from 2 to 6 months

Tools/partners/suppliers of the good practice

University administration

Мargarita Misheva, PHD at NBU

What are the benefits of the project ?

This initiative helps blind students, and especially during the pandemic, they needed our support even more in order to be able to cope with the teaching material, the distance form of learning and the new ways of teaching. Despite the introduction of virtual classrooms, we had to provide additional information tailored to their needs.

What were the constraints faced by the company ?

Restrictions: In order for this information to be available, many administrative staff had to be involved in work processing, which was difficult to organize during the pandemic and governemental restrictions.
Time: Оur desire was to have as many titles available to blind students as possible, keeping in mind their learning process. We had to synchronize our actions quickly in order to achieve timely results and be supportive to our students.

Which advice would give to another company ?

We advise colleagues from other universities to adapt quickly to the changing learning environment and not to forget disadvantaged people and their desire to study on an equal footing with others. In addition, I believe that large companies can also adapt in a similar way part of their company documentation, such as information security policies, health policies, guidelines and company requirements, to be accessible to all in a similar way.

What are the next steps?

We continue to work in the same direction as this year we intend to add more current topics and titles. We constantly consult with specialists on how to improve the learning process and learning environment and keep in touch with students to see their feedback, what they are happy with, what and where we can improve.