Esteemed partners, esteemed members of the research and academic world，

Dear professors and colleagues from UASR，

These weeks, in Romania, as in all Europe and all around the world, the pandemics started by SARS-CoV-2 generated one of the most profound medical, social and economic crises of the last few decades. The dangers are not only medical and they do not only generate a decrease in the economic, cultural and financial activities, but they are very profound ones and cause important changes in the teaching activities also, at all levels: from pre-school activities to university ones.

Solidarity and good coordination of the university life, empathy and helping others are the most valuable reactions that we encourage at the West University of Timisoara, through all of our eleven faculties. More than this, we have started a group of volunteers through which we are involved in social activities, fulfilling the social mission we undertake in the community of the most important cities of the western part of Romania. This way, we can support the volunteering efforts towards the public missions that are so important during the special times that we now live in.

The pandemic has changed our lives in just weeks and lead to a radical change in our approaches towards pedagogic practices. At the West University of Timisoara, which ranks among the best universities of Romania and has increased constantly its ranking in the most important international classifications, we’ve managed to completely pass from the face-to-face activities to the distance education, in an online form, through educational instruments that we have previously tested and implemented in our university in the last few years.

The academic community, both students and teachers, had a great reaction to this change, to the generalized use of online education applications and of the long-distance communication tools for lectures and seminars. Students have increased their involvement in the new form of learning activities, being extremely satisfied with these new approaches. We’ve noticed that in the special period that the entire society is going through, communication becomes more fluid, adapted to the objective needs and instruments, such as the online video applications that allow simultaneous users, contribute a lot to the quality of the teaching activities.

The online infrastructure, that became so important for having the teaching activities, especially now, in the crises generated by the spread of the coronavirus, includes the e-learning platform that we have available in the West University for some years now (used both by the teaching staff and students, but also by the staff of the other functional areas of our institution). The West University of Timisoara has now an integrated system of platforms dedicated to the online teaching, adapted to the comprehensive character of our university, such as the Moodle platform (that was adapted to our needs), but also the classic Google Classroom or Edmodo, or Google Meet and Skype for Business for the videoconferences. These instruments facilitate the students’ access to the lecture materials and online bibliographic resources, the electronic communication between students and teachers, both through private messages but also through discussion forums, the organizing of videoconferences, setting educational tasks for students, setting homework and tasks for the students, but also evaluating them and giving feedback on their work. Basically, all teaching-learning-evaluating activities are possible through the online infrastructure.

Education, humanist values of human knowledge and development through learning and scientific progress are universal, for all continents and all cultures. Even during extremely hard times, dominated by constraints and by the limitations of epidemiologic risks, the message of the academic community and of the university researchers can only be that of trust in the reaction power of humans, respectless of their location, in their optimism towards the future in which, only together, we’ll be able to find the means of protecting the citizens and the society as a whole, through knowledge and culture that will allow us to overpass all dangers of our lives.

With hope and all my appreciation for the colleagues in UASR.

Sincerely yours,

Marilen Gabriel Pirtea, Professor PhD

Rector of the West University of Timisoara