Abstract:

Management in higher education is a vital issue not only from the perspective of students or academics, but it is also important for the development of the whole society. Creating a university based on solid humanistic values, its further development, as well as the method of its management are some of the greatest challenges of modern times that have a significant impact on future generations. The article is written in the spirit of humanistic management, and the main focus is on values, as well as building human capital and increasing the social capital of an organization such as a university.
As part of the quality assurance activities, a number of initiatives under the common name of Ars Docendi were launched at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) in 2005. They included for example 30-hours educational workshop for lecturers. Based on the experience gained and aiming at the formalization of the above mentioned initiative, on October 1st, 2014, the Ars Docendi Center of Excellence for Academic Teaching started to operate as a non-faculty related organizational unit. It is worth noting that JU CDDA is the unique unit at Polish general universities which, at a central university level, specializes in improving the competence of teaching staff as far as both the basics of academic teaching and subject education (humanities, social, exact and natural science) and soft skills (communication, teamwork etc.) are concerned. A true phenomenon is the fact that most of the JU Ars Docendi workshops are attended by doctoral students and lecturers. In addition, the diversity of scientific disciplines represented by the workshops participants makes it possible to demonstrate the broad spectrum of problems faced by academics, as well as to present the variety of solutions applied. The Center staff is composed not only of educators, psychologists and management specialists, which is typical for such units in Europe, but also of researchers in various subjects – Pedagogical Content Knowledge experts.