Report on the XXIX Inauguration of the WSB-NLU Academic Year 2020/2021

On 16th October 2020, during the XXIX Inauguration of the Academic Year 2020/2021 of the Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu - National Louis University based in Nowy Sącz, an inaugural lecture entitled. "Psychomitology - what is it, how to deal with it and who should do it?" was delivered by Jarosław Orzechowski, Ph.D., Professor at the Jagiellonian University - psychologist and university lecturer, as well as author of books, popular science articles, publications and congress speeches. In his lecture, the psychologist referred to the increasingly common phenomenon of Psychomitology. It consists in the dissemination of content about human nature that pretends to be scientific, but in reality is inconsistent with research findings. Jarosław Orzechowski, PhD, Professor at the Jagiellonian University, presented scientific data that dispel myths about the functioning of our brain, cognitive development or talent.

The introductory speech by the Rector of the WSB-NLU, Dr Dariusz Woźniak, focused on the mission of the university, which has been pursued for over 30 years and is based on universal principles, conducting not only purely educational and scientific activities, but also application, conference, publishing and advisory activities. The Rector of the WSB-NLU reported that over 1,900 new students started the next academic year 2020/2021. It is worth noting that, taking into account mid-year recruitment, this means more than 2,000 new members of the academic community. The University currently educates more than 3,300 students and listeners, in the fields of: Management, Computer Science and Psychology in full-time and part-time modes, as well as interactively in the RealTime Online formula. The postgraduate studies and extension courses are also being expanded every year. Due to high interest in the university, this year's recruitment was extended twice. At the moment, paper documents are still being sent in, so it is estimated that the number of students will increase by about 250 more, and by the end of October the number of students at the WSB-NLU will be over 3,500.
Education is provided in three languages (Polish, English, Russian) at the main campus, in Nowy Sącz, but also in Tarnów, Kraków and Radom. The University's plans focus on the consistent implementation of its strategy, i.e. work and study programmes created together with companies, the development of new branches, including in Warsaw, and expansion abroad. A further six universities have joined the wide range of foreign partners in 2019/2020, including two Universities from Uzbekistan (Bukhara and Samarkand) and very similar to WSB-NLU's profile, a business university from Chennai, India.

Due to the current epidemiological situation and the restrictions resulting from it, this year's ceremony had to be organised in smaller numbers. It was attended by the university authorities, a small group of teaching and administrative staff, as well as guests, matriculated students and a representation of graduates. In order to enable all those interested to participate, the entire ceremony was broadcast on the WSB-NLU Facebook fanpage via the university's Cloud Academy system.

"The university has been well prepared since the start of the pandemic to deliver classes using its proprietary Cloud Academy platform. In March this year, right after the outbreak of the pandemic, it took us less than 4 hours to change the entire university into a cloud university, which, compared to other universities, both public and non-public, which have been failing at this 'art' with varying degrees of success for over 8 months, we are at the forefront of conducting remote classes in Poland. This is also indicated by the dynamic growth of interest in our CloudA system and the fact that students are looking for such solutions (the growth on the entries of sites related to education in the RealTime Online model at our university is at the level of several hundred percent).
We are delighted to see that enrolment is up 82 per cent on the previous year. This shows that we are heading in the right direction, and our University has once again started to count not only in the Polish arena, but has also become noticeable in the international arena, due to the signing of several agreements with major universities from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Ukraine, and future plans speak of opening a branch in London". - said Dr Dariusz Woźniak, Rector of the WSB-NLU in Nowy Sącz.