Dear students and table tennis friends,
I am pleased to greet you at the official beginning/start on the TT study programme and wish you all an eventful and productive 1st semester with lots of interesting lectures.
Parallel to the scheduled start of classes, I’ve just wanted to address you once more and give you additional information and explanations on the programme and the forthcoming semester.
Firstly, you should have in mind that you have enrolled a University degree study programme in sports training/coaching. So, although a lot of additional emphasis of the programme is put on table tennis coaching/training science, you should not think of it as a specific table tennis coaching course. It is still a general, well-rounded study programme in sports training/coaching, but one that has been designed to suit the needs of table tennis coaches and players.
Therefore, you should not expect that all or even majority of the content within the generic sport science disciplines is going to be directly related to table tennis or have a direct practical implications on your coaching abilities. The main aim of generic courses is to extend/enlarge your general knowledge about training and coaching science and help you broaden your coaching horizons. Adding this well-rounded generic knowledge to the already existing high level of your table tennis knowledge and skills should increase the level of your overall coaching expertise as well.
Secondly, you should be aware that we are at the beginning of a completely new study programme and that, in a certain sense, you are “test pilots” of the programme, who I believe will help us build the programme that would truly address the needs of our TT community.
Therefore, I expect you, as people coming from the core of this sport, to contribute to the programme, not just by being good and responsible students, but also by providing us with your valuable feedback and by suggesting to us some new ideas on how to enhance the programme to better suit your needs as the true representatives of our sport. The ones for who we’ve made this programme for.
In this way, by being actively involved and engaged in improving the programme, you can help us not just to enhance the quality of your own studies in following years, but you could also help all the students who plan to enrol this programme in near future.
So, we are counting on your help and plan to closely monitor the feedback we receive from our students and learn from it. It is always possible to make organisational improvements to the programme in general or to make necessary adjustments to the courses themselves (both in terms of the content itself or the way the content is delivered), if such prove to be necessary and beneficial for our students.
In any case, you should also be aware that you will gain the full/complete picture about this study programme only following the completion of the first practical part of the programme, as its integral and highly important part.
Therefore, although you are encouraged to constantly share with us your thoughts and ideas on the programme during our regular contacts while having classes or consultations, once a year you will also have an opportunity to do it officially in a regular anonymous survey that is going to be conducted following the completion of each summer semester, at the end of the practical part of the programme. In the survey you will get a chance to assess both quality of classes and engaged lecturers as well as to point out any organisational shortcomings of the study programme, if such would prove to exist according to your opinion. The results will be used to evaluate and improve both the teaching process and organisation of the programme itself.
At the end of this introductory part of my addressing to students at the beginning of classes on the TT study programme I want to provide you with some additional suggestions and guidelines I believe can be beneficial to you as new students.
Therefore, I decided to organise and write guidelines for your better understanding of what is expected from you and what you can expect, as students, on the programme.
Those guidelines; I am providing you with in the attachment, are not intended to be some kind of official TT study manual, but are more a collection of general remarks and suggestions I wrote to share my thoughts with you with regard to some of the questions you may and probably will ask me at some point of time or some issues you could encounter during your studies.
So, please go through it and I hope you’ll find them helpful.
Best regards,
Goran Munivrana
(Edited by Ivana Duran - original submission Wednesday, 16 November 2016, 8:33 AM)