Two Polish universities have signed an agreement to create what would be the world’s first online degrees in Polish Studies available to international students.
The project is being coordinated by Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) and the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL). The rectors of the two Lublin-based universities last week signed a letter of intent to create the Polish Studies programme.
They aim to create 10 online, multimedia courses in English on topics including Poland’s history, literature and art, contribution to science and learning, and contemporary society. The content would be hosted on international online study platform Coursera.
Each course would end with an online exam, allowing students to eventually obtain a bachelor’s or master’s degree.
The programme will be “aimed mainly at foreigners who want to explore the culture and history of Poland, [to gain] knowledge of Polish literature”, said RadosÅ‚aw Dobrowolski, the rector of UMCS.
“Many prestigious universities around the world already offer so-called ‘national studies’, such as British, French or German Studies,” notes his university. “Polish Studies is therefore a unique educational offer dedicated to the Polish diaspora and the international community interested in Poland.”
Dobrowolski’s counterpart at KUL, MirosÅ‚aw Kalinowski, said that they would work to ensure that lecturers for the course are fluent in English and that all necessary infrastructure for online teaching and learning is in place.
The universities hope to launch the programme in the 2025/26 academic year, although they say that will depend on first securing the necessary funds to put everything in place.
A number of other universities in Poland and abroad offer Polish Studies programmes in English, including the University of Cambridge, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Opole. None, however, offer the possibility of completing a degree completely online.
Polish universities are attracting a growing number of international students. During the 2020/21 academic year, there were around 85,000 foreign students from 189 countries in Poland, making up almost 7% of all students, reports the Rzeczpospolita daily. That was up from around 21,500 a decade year earlier.
Last year, over half of Poland’s 85,000 international students come from either Ukraine (38,473) or Belarus (9,739). However, the numbers coming from Asia, including India (2,563) and China (1,609), have also been growing, notes Rzeczpospolita.
Among western countries, the largest number of students came from Spain (1,574), Germany (1,435), Norway (1,321), Sweden (753) and the United States (692).
Poland’s universities do not rate very highly in global rankings, with only two – Kraków’s Jagiellonian University and the University of Warsaw – inside the top 500, according to the QS World University Ranking and the Academic Ranking of World Universities.
In Poland’s own leading university ranking, published annually by the Perspektywy magazine, UMCS is placed 40th and KUL in 47th.