From May 1 to May 18, 2026, Sumy State University conducted a large-scale internal professional development programme for academic staff titled "Designing and Teaching Online Courses for the DigiUni Project." The training aimed to develop the digital competencies of educators and prepare them to create modern, European-standard educational content within the framework of the international project Digital University – Open Ukrainian Initiative (101129236–DigiUni–ERASMUS-EDU-2023-CBHE).

The lecturers for the internal trainings were leading university experts: Ph.D. in Technical Sciences, Associate Professor, Director of the E-Learning Technologies Center, Yurii Zuban; Ph.D. in Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Associate Professor, Head of the Computer Science Department, Oksana Shovkoplias; and Ph.D. in Technical Sciences, Associate Professor, Head of the Information Technology Department, Anna Nenia. The programme combined intensive synchronous meetings with independent work on the project's digital platform DigiPlatform.

During the online sessions, participants mastered the fundamentals of Instructional Design, principles of Backward Design, and goal formulation according to Bloom's taxonomy. The trainers paid significant attention to leading active learning models (7E, 5E, BOPPPS, Kolb's Cycle, Gagne's model), as well as gamification and microlearning tools. A separate important module was dedicated to studying the DigiPlatform ecosystem and hands-on piloting of the CourseDesigner tool.

The asynchronous part of the training consisted of six specialized modules, where educators deepened their knowledge of online e-tutoring in Moodle, configuring quizzes and assessment systems, implementing educational innovations, and Project-Based Learning (PBL). The culmination of the programme was an individual practical assignment: the development of a personalized digital mini-lesson or micro-module for the educator's discipline using new interactive tools.

In total, more than forty SumDU academic staff members joined the training and received university-issued Certificates of Professional Development as well as international-level Certificates. Based on the evaluation results, 29 educators demonstrated a high level of engagement and completed the programme, fulfilling all requirements (with a success rate of over 80%).

The acquired skills serve as a foundation for the next step. Currently, the DigiUni Project  is transitioning to a new, most crucial phase—the direct development of digital innovative courses for the nationwide platform. According to the project's grant application, the development teams must complete the creation of the first digital materials by January 2027.

We congratulate the educators on completing the training and wish them inspiration in creating innovative educational content!

#DigiUni #ERASMUS+ #DigiPlatform #DigitalEducation #DigitalTransformation