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Undergraduate classes are five days a week in three-hour increments. They are comprised of narrower course offerings in the early, foundational, years, and a more wide range as the specialization/tracks of students occur in the last two years of study. The teaching methods include: primarily internal and occasional external lecturers for the lecture classes.
Seminars, workshops, monthly scientific excursions, internships, and university, regional, and international summer schools are also among the teaching methods.
At the undergraduate level, every class has exams, as well as research projects and essays. At the postgraduate level, the entrance exam is judged blindly, i.e. the student name is unknown to the examiner, and the thesis is orally defended to a three-person committee. At the doctoral level, the candidate defends their dissertation to a seven-person committee. The student/teacher ratio is prohibitively high: officially, approximately 300 incoming students to 35 faculty but, due to student yearly carryover, the actual ratio is 700 to 35. Teacher workload is thus negatively affected, especially as there are no teaching assistants. Teacher student collaboration is thus de facto limited, and is determined by student initiative. The high student/teacher ratio limits the existing classroom and workshop spaces. The Department addressed the issue of student/teacher collaboration in 2013 through the addition of tutorials. The strong e-learning initiative also implemented by the Department is an innovative way of addressing resource limitations as well as being in the forefront of 21st century educational pedagogies.
The teaching procedures are representative of standard academic and pedagogical practice. Faculty members teach their past and ongoing research, the latter of which becomes the impetus for course material updating. With the implementation of e-learning in the last three years and the Department’s participation in the Open Course Wave Consortium, students, but also the society at large, have access to free knowledge exchange locally, nationally, and internationally. There is the possibility of strong mobility among students and faculty due to the Erasmus program, but due to limited resources, only a certain proportion of the large student body is able to participate. Some, especially the more junior faculty, also participate in academic research programs internationally (e.g. US, Turkey, Bulgaria), an experience which enriches not only their own research but also their teaching.
Since 2008, the Department has been implementing anonymous student evaluations of each of its courses (teaching, course content, resources) at the end of each semester. These are sent to the Department’s administration office and then the Rector’s office.