Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
Between 2020 and 2025, Polish universities underwent a structural shift in how they deliver instruction. What started as a response to pandemic-period closures has, in a number of cases, developed into deliberate policy around hybrid and asynchronous delivery. The process was uneven, shaped by institutional size, discipline, and the technical infrastructure each university had in place before the period of disruption began.
The initial phase: emergency remote teaching
From March 2020, Polish universities moved to distance delivery within a matter of weeks. The transition was governed by a series of ministerial orders from the Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerstwo Edukacji i Nauki), which allowed institutions to conduct examinations and assessments remotely using electronic means for the first time in Polish higher education law.
Most institutions relied initially on Microsoft Teams and Zoom for synchronous delivery, while Moodle — already deployed at the majority of larger public universities — became the primary platform for asynchronous materials, assignment submission, and grading. A 2021 survey by the Foundation for Polish Science noted that approximately 73 percent of academic staff had not used an LMS environment in a teaching capacity prior to 2020. The speed of adaptation was therefore significant, even if the quality of early delivery varied considerably.
The regulatory framework permitted remote examinations — but it did not specify how institutions should handle disciplines where practical competencies are assessed face to face. That gap produced inconsistency that persisted through 2021 and into 2022.
Institutional responses after the emergency period
By the 2022/23 academic year, a clearer picture had emerged of how different institutions were approaching the longer-term question of whether to retain elements of remote delivery. Public research universities — including the University of Warsaw, Jagiellonian University, and the Warsaw University of Technology — largely moved back to in-person delivery as the default, while retaining remote options for specific course types: large lectures with hundreds of attendees, language courses, and elective modules in disciplines with dispersed student populations.
Private universities showed more variation. Several institutions — particularly those with a pre-existing student base in part-time and continuing education formats — moved aggressively toward hybrid models because their students, often working adults, found synchronous remote attendance more practical than commuting for evening classes. The MBA and postgraduate landscape saw the most sustained move toward remote-first delivery.
The role of the Polish Accreditation Committee
PKA (Polska Komisja Akredytacyjna), which evaluates degree programmes for compliance with national quality standards, adapted its evaluation criteria during the period to account for remote delivery. From 2021 onward, PKA evaluations included specific scrutiny of how institutions ensured academic integrity in remote assessments, how practical and laboratory components were handled in hybrid formats, and whether the quality of asynchronous materials met pedagogical standards for the discipline.
PKA has published evaluation summaries for the 2022 and 2023 cycles that document recurrent findings: inconsistency in the quality of asynchronous materials across departments within a single institution, variation in how academic staff record and make accessible lecture recordings, and gaps in how students with disabilities are supported in remote examination environments. These summaries are publicly available on pka.edu.pl.
Infrastructure differences between cities and regions
Remote study in Poland is not a uniform experience. Broadband penetration in major cities — Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań — is high enough that connectivity rarely becomes a limiting factor for synchronous participation. In rural areas and smaller towns, the situation differs: the 2023 report from the Office of Electronic Communications (UKE) documented that roughly 11 percent of households in Poland lacked access to broadband at speeds adequate for sustained video conferencing.
This created a structurally unequal situation for students enrolled at regional universities or at institutions with students commuting from areas outside major urban centres. Several institutions implemented asynchronous-first policies for this reason — designing courses so that synchronous sessions were recorded and all assessable content was accessible without real-time participation.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Government, public domain.
What changed in assessment design
One of the least-discussed but most consequential changes was in how assessments were designed. Remote written examinations — whether timed or take-home — required different question structures to remain valid as indicators of competency. Open-book timed exams, portfolio assessments, and oral examinations conducted over video became more common across disciplines that had previously relied on closed-book written formats.
The shift produced secondary effects on how students approached learning. Several studies from Polish pedagogical institutions noted changes in study patterns: less memorisation-focused preparation, more emphasis on applied synthesis tasks. Whether these changes will persist as in-person formats return depends largely on individual academic staff decisions rather than institutional policy at most universities.
Where things stand in 2025
As of the 2024/25 academic year, the modal format at Polish public universities remains in-person delivery with remote options maintained for specific circumstances. The infrastructure built between 2020 and 2023 — LMS deployments, staff familiarity with synchronous tools, updated regulations around remote assessment — has not been dismantled. Instead, it sits as a second-mode capability that institutions deploy selectively.
For students considering Polish universities for distance study, the practical reality is that fully remote degrees remain the exception rather than the rule at Polish public institutions. Where remote or hybrid options exist at the degree level, they tend to be in postgraduate and continuing education formats. Undergraduate study in Poland remains predominantly in-person.
Further reading: Ministry of Education and Science (gov.pl) | Polish Accreditation Committee