Are you preparing your timetable for the spring semester? You can add online and hybrid inter-university courses from six European universities partnered within the EDUC (European Digital UniverCity) Alliance to your timetable and get both the credits and an international experience at the same time. In addition to MU, the EDUC Alliance includes five other universities from France, Germany, Italy and Hungary. Registrations are open during January and February.
For the spring semester, EDUC is opening a total of 38 online and hybrid courses taught by lecturers from Masaryk University and partner universities in Rennes, Paris Nanterre, Pécs, Potsdam and Cagliari. The courses are usually open to all students of the partner institutions, so students from all universities involved in EDUC can meet in virtual classes.
A complete list of courses offered by the Alliance is available in the online EDUC course catalogue (courses taught in the spring semester need to be displayed using the filter “Starting semester: 2nd”). In this place, students can find all information about the course contents, the number of credits awarded, prerequisites and the universities for which a course is open. The catalogue also contains information on registration deadlines – these may vary between universities and should be kept in mind as some courses have registration deadlines in January and others in February.
Online courses in various fields
Nearly forty courses offered in the spring semester focus on a variety of fields – from law and political science to economics, natural sciences, medicine and pharmacy. For example, students can enrol in courses such as Discrimination Law (University of Paris Nanterre), British Literature and Culture and Neuroscience (University of Pécs), Sustainable Business (University of Cagliari) and Citizenship of EU (University of Rennes), for which registrations closed on Thursday 20 January. Until mid-January, students could also register for the very popular hybrid course called Refugee Integration (University of Potsdam).
A new course on scientific thinking and research – Initiation to Research and Critical Thinking (University of Cagliari) – may also prove very useful for undergraduate students wishing to learn how to think like a scientist and how to conduct research and experiments. The course includes a week-long excursion to a laboratory. Registrations were due by Monday 24 January.
In addition to discipline-specific courses, EDUC also offers language courses in French, Hungarian, German and Italian, which have been massively popular among students in the pilot semesters. In spring last year, Barbora Prikrylová, a student at the Faculty of Science, enrolled in an intensive course of Italian taught three times a week and was quite enthusiastic about it.
“I have wanted to learn Italian for a long time and I’ve been thinking about going to Italy for a study stay. So I thought this course might be a good start. And I have to say it was a great experience. It was very interesting because there were twenty students in our group from many different countries, so I had classmates from Hungary, France, Poland, Russia, Spain, South Africa and Latin America. The atmosphere was very friendly and relaxed and we even had occasional language sneak peeks into how to say certain words in the other students’ mother tongues. It was great and I learned a lot. I would definitely enrol in something like this again,” said the science student.
You can also enrol in online courses taught at MU
In addition to courses from partner universities, Masaryk University also offers interesting online courses of its own, such as Images of Australia in Literature and Film; Contemporary Latin American society: Key Challenges or Landscape and Environment: Stylistic and Aesthetic Approaches.
Additionally, Masaryk University in cooperation with the City of Brno will open a hybrid course in the spring semester called Green City (worth 5 ECTS credits) focusing on transport and the environment. The course will run from 25 February to 23 July, with students from the partner universities coming to Brno for a full-time programme which will take place from 17 to 23 July, so MU students will be able to meet their EDUC colleagues in person. Registration is open until Sunday 30 January.
Other course will also be offered by the EDUC Alliance in the autumn semester. Overall, there should be more than 100 of them. In future, even more educators, not only from Masaryk University, should be involved in teaching across the six European universities to make the course selection even larger and more diverse. See this article for further details about the EDUC Alliance and the international online learning it brings to Masaryk University.