Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
Polish higher education institutions use a relatively small set of tools for distance learning delivery. The combination varies by institution, but the dominant stack in 2024/25 consists of an LMS for asynchronous materials and a video conferencing platform for synchronous sessions. This article documents what those tools are, how they are typically deployed, and where the main differences in experience arise for learners.
Learning management systems in use
Moodle is the most widely deployed LMS in Polish higher education. As an open-source platform, it can be hosted by institutions directly, which suits the data residency preferences of public universities operating under Polish and EU data protection requirements. Major universities including the University of Warsaw (UW), Jagiellonian University (UJ), and AGH University of Science and Technology run Moodle instances at scale, handling course enrolment, materials distribution, quiz and assignment submission, and gradebook functions.
The configuration of Moodle varies significantly across institutions. Some universities operate highly structured course templates with standardised navigation; others leave course design entirely to individual academic staff, resulting in significant inconsistency in how students navigate different courses within the same institution. This is not a Moodle limitation — it is an institutional policy question about how much standardisation to impose on course design.
Blackboard is used at a smaller number of Polish universities, primarily private institutions with enterprise agreements. Microsoft 365 Education, including Teams and the associated SharePoint and Forms functionality, is used as a secondary system at several institutions — particularly for communication and file sharing rather than formal course delivery.
Synchronous delivery: the video conferencing layer
Microsoft Teams became the de facto synchronous delivery layer at the majority of Polish public universities during 2020–2022. The primary driver was institutional licensing: Polish universities operating under Microsoft Campus Agreement had access to Teams as part of existing agreements, which removed procurement barriers during the emergency period. Teams' integration with SharePoint and institutional email directories also simplified user management.
Zoom is used at a number of institutions, particularly for postgraduate programmes and international courses where participants may be outside institutional Microsoft environments. BigBlueButton — an open-source video conferencing platform designed specifically for educational use — is integrated directly into Moodle at some universities, allowing synchronous sessions to be launched and recorded within the LMS without requiring a separate application.
What differs between platforms for learners
From a learner's perspective, the practical differences between Teams and Zoom for a standard lecture are modest. Both handle synchronous video, screen sharing, chat, and breakout rooms adequately for most educational formats. The more consequential differences appear in three areas:
- Recording and access: Teams recordings are stored in SharePoint or OneDrive and access can be managed by the lecturer. Zoom recordings may be stored in Zoom cloud or locally, with less consistent access policies across institutions. BigBlueButton recordings are stored within the Moodle instance, making them consistently accessible through the course interface.
- Integration with assessment: Neither Teams nor Zoom integrates directly with Moodle gradebook functions without additional configuration. BigBlueButton, as a Moodle plugin, can log attendance and session participation data directly to the course gradebook.
- Bandwidth requirements: All three platforms perform comparably at standard broadband speeds. At marginal connectivity levels (below 5 Mbps download), BigBlueButton has historically required less bandwidth than Teams or Zoom for equivalent video quality, though the differences are small in practice.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
Asynchronous formats: what works and what creates friction
The most consistent source of difficulty in Polish distance learning contexts is not the synchronous layer — it is the quality and accessibility of asynchronous materials. PKA evaluation reports from 2022 and 2023 repeatedly noted that recorded lecture quality varied widely, that materials were often uploaded in formats that created accessibility problems for students using assistive technologies, and that course navigation in Moodle was inconsistent.
Specific friction points documented across multiple institutions include: lecture recordings uploaded as raw video files without captions, PDF materials scanned as images without text extraction (making them unsearchable and inaccessible for screen readers), and quiz configurations in Moodle that do not provide feedback after submission — removing the formative learning value of the assessment.
These are not technology problems; they reflect the training and support available to academic staff for course design. Institutions that invested in digital pedagogical support units — typically called Centres for e-Learning or Academic Development Centres — during the 2020–2023 period show measurably more consistent asynchronous material quality in PKA evaluations than those that left course design entirely to individual staff.
Hybrid formats: the current state
As of 2025, the most common hybrid format at Polish universities is what might be called "parallel streaming" — a lecture conducted in a physical classroom, simultaneously streamed via Teams or Zoom for remote participants. This format is practical to implement but creates a two-tier experience: in-room students have full access to the physical space and informal interaction, while remote participants receive a streamed view of the room with variable audio quality depending on the physical setup.
More carefully designed hybrid formats — where the teaching is explicitly designed for both audiences simultaneously, with dedicated remote-participant interaction built into the session structure — are less common but are documented at a small number of Polish institutions that invested in hybrid classroom infrastructure between 2021 and 2023.
Summary
The tool landscape for virtual classrooms in Poland is stable and relatively narrow: Moodle for async, Teams or Zoom (or BigBlueButton) for sync. The quality of the learning experience in these environments depends less on which tools are chosen than on how courses are designed, how materials are prepared, and whether institutions support staff in digital course design. That support infrastructure varies considerably across the sector.
Reference: PKA evaluation reports | Moodle community documentation