Popova University Burgas — Proposed Curriculum

Academic Model · 11 August 2026 · Christopher O. Lovald

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Contents

Part I — The System: 1. Academic Philosophy & Curriculum Principles · 2. The Popova Graduate Profile · 3. University-Wide Learning Outcomes Part II — Academic Structure: 4. Degree & Credit Structure · 5. The Founding Programme Portfolio · 6. The Popova Core · 7. The Project Spine · 8. Open Horizon & Interdisciplinary Bridges Part III — The Programmes: 9. Marine & Environmental Sciences · 10. Music & Performing Arts · 11. Economics & Business Administration · 12. Computer Science & AI · 13. Philosophy & Education Part IV — How Learning Works: 14. Assessment Framework · 15. Progression Model · 16. Delivery Model · 17. The Burgas Residency Curriculum · 18. How the Initiatives Support Learning Part V — The Institution: 19. Staffing Implications · 20. Quality Assurance & Curriculum Review · 21. Accreditation and Regulatory Considerations · 22. Future Academic Expansion: Phases Two and Three · 23. Public Summary for popova.university · 24. Current Design and Planning Assumptions

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Part I — The System

1. Academic Philosophy & Curriculum Principles

This framework turns the Popova University concept into a coherent academic system: the basis for degree programmes, accreditation work, faculty recruitment, the academic pages of popova.university, and actual teaching. It is designed top-down — the university first, the faculties second, the courses last — so that a marine scientist, a musician, an entrepreneur, a programmer and an educator graduate from recognisably the same institution.

The design source is Learning for Life: A Modern Approach to Education (Anastasia Lovald, Olidia Lovald, 2024), the university’s founding pedagogy, governed by the principle on its first page — the words of Lady Lidia Popova:

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.”

The model is shaped by five values: Lucidity, Inquisitiveness, Dignity, Intelligence and Art. Together they inform how the Popova model approaches learning, relationships, judgment, creativity and life beyond the classroom.

Ten binding rules follow from it. Every structure in this framework must satisfy them, and every future curriculum change is tested against them.

1. Assisted discovery. Courses are built around questions students investigate, not material students receive. The professor frames the territory; the student does the finding.
2. Learning for life, not for examinations. Every course must answer: what can the graduate do outside the examination hall because of this course?
3. Relationships first. No live seminar exceeds fifteen students. Every student has a personal mentor for all four years.
4. Ownership. Students choose projects, pathways and electives; pace adapts to the person wherever the framework allows.
5. Learning by doing. Project-based and inquiry-based work is the default format. Every course produces an artefact: something analysed, built, composed, argued, taught or shipped.
6. Emotional intelligence is curriculum. Empathy, resilience, self-awareness and communication are taught and practised explicitly, with the same seriousness as any technical subject.
7. Technology with a conscience. Every student graduates fluent in AI and digital tools, and fluent in their ethics.
8. The real world is the syllabus. Financial literacy, communication, adaptability and collaboration appear inside every programme.
9. The community co-educates. Burgas — its schools, businesses, stages and coastline — is a standing teaching partner, and the university’s public initiatives are curriculum infrastructure, not decoration.
10. Nothing is final. The university is the first laboratory of its own pedagogy: every course is measured, and the Faculty of Philosophy & Education revises the model on evidence.

Rigour clause: student-centred does not mean academically soft. Artifacts carry published criteria, oral defence is standard, disciplinary knowledge is examined where the discipline genuinely requires it, and progression gates are evidence-based (Sections 14–15).

2. The Popova Graduate Profile

Before any course is named, the university defines what every graduate — of any faculty — is. The Popova graduate holds disciplinary mastery of their field at full bachelor level, demonstrated through a four-year portfolio of real work rather than examination transcripts alone. Beyond the discipline, every Popova graduate can:

1. Reason — construct, defend and revise an argument with evidence, and detect a bad one.
2. Learn — teach themselves any new field deliberately, because they have studied how learning works and practised it for four years.
3. Make — carry a real project from question to finished artefact: designed, executed, documented, presented.
4. Use intelligent tools — work fluently with AI and digital systems in their own field, and judge when and how their use is legitimate.
5. Communicate — write, speak and present professionally in English, and operate in the university’s trilingual environment.
6. Collaborate — work in and lead small teams, including across disciplines, with the emotional intelligence that makes teams function.
7. Handle real life — manage money, contracts, taxes and personal planning at the level of an independent adult.
8. Act responsibly — recognise the ethical and environmental dimension of their professional decisions and answer for their choices.
9. Contribute — have already done visible work for a real community, because the degree required it.
10. Sustain themselves — know their own wellbeing, motivation and limits, and manage a working life accordingly.

This profile is the acceptance test of the whole framework: every block below must build at least one line of it, and every line must be built somewhere.

3. University-Wide Learning Outcomes

The graduate profile expands into eight outcome domains. Each domain names where it is primarily taught and where it is assessed — so the framework is auditable: no outcome without a home, no course without an outcome.

#	Outcome domain	Primarily built in	Assessed through
O1	Disciplinary mastery	Faculty major, capstone	Course artefacts, capstone defence
O2	Critical & creative thinking	Core S1, Core S4, all inquiry courses	Argument artefacts, creative work, oral defence
O3	Self-directed learning	Core S2, self-directed blocks, mentoring	Learning-project documentation, portfolio reviews
O4	Digital & AI fluency with ethics	Core S1–S2, Core S7, majors’ tool courses	AI-assisted project + ethical assessment
O5	Communication & presentation	Academic writing strand, showcases, defences	Written artefacts, public presentation record
O6	Collaboration & leadership	Project teams, Year-2 spine project, residencies	Team artefacts with role documentation, peer/mentor review
O7	Practical life capability	Core S5, venture/consulting components	Financial plan artefact, project-execution record
O8	Ethical, civic & environmental responsibility	Core S3, Core S6, Year-3 public work	Ethics portfolio, sustainability audit, community-work record

Programme-level outcomes (Sections 9–13) specialise O1 per degree; O2–O8 are identical across the university and are what makes a degree unmistakably Popova.

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Part II — Academic Structure

4. Degree & Credit Structure

The proposed Popova University model comprises Bachelor’s degrees of 240 ECTS over four years (eight semesters), aligned with the Bologna framework and the Bulgarian academic year (October–June, residencies in July), delivered online with credit-bearing summer residencies in Burgas. Working language of instruction: English, with Bulgarian and Greek academic support and language electives (Section 24). Every degree, in every faculty, is built from the same five blocks:

Block	ECTS	Share	Content
The Popova Core	48	20%	Eight shared courses — two foundations, five cares, one synthesis — one per semester, every student, every faculty
Faculty Major	120	50%	Twenty-four taught courses of 5 ECTS, three per semester, defined per programme in Part III
The Project Spine / Residencies	18	7.5%	Three summer residencies of 6 ECTS in Burgas after years one, two and three, carrying the Year 1–3 spine projects
Capstone	18	7.5%	The Year-4 spine project: thesis, venture, shipped system, public creative work, or taught intervention
Open Horizon Electives	36	15%	Six courses of 6 ECTS taken in other faculties, years one to three

Semester load. Years one to three: 27 ECTS per semester (one core course + three major courses + one Open Horizon elective) plus the 6-ECTS summer residency — 60 ECTS per year. Year four: 30 ECTS per semester (one core course + three major courses + 9 ECTS of capstone) — 60 ECTS. Total: 240.

Course levels and progression. Courses are levelled 100 (introductory, years 1), 200 (intermediate, year 2), 300 (advanced, year 3) and 400 (specialised/synthesis, year 4). Prerequisite chains are defined per programme in Part III; the university-wide chains are: Core S1→S2 precede all 200-level inquiry work; each programme’s methods/mathematics strand precedes its analytical 300-level courses; residency N requires good standing in year N; the capstone requires a mentor-approved proposal delivered at the end of semester 6 and defended at the start of semester 7. Progression evidence is defined in Section 15.

The breadth rule. The six Open Horizon electives must span at least three of the four other faculties. A computer scientist therefore graduates having also, for example, analysed Black Sea data, produced a piece of music and argued an ethics seminar — the “university for life” made structural.

5. The Founding Programme Portfolio

Faculties are organisational units; programmes are what students enrol in — and a founding university earns credibility by opening few, deep programmes rather than many thin ones. The founding portfolio is therefore exactly five bachelor programmes, one per faculty, each broad at entry and specialising through pathways chosen at the end of year two — with one stated exception: Music declares at the end of year one, because studio progression needs the years, and its pathway studios begin in Semester 3. Pathways share the programme’s spine and differ in their year 3–4 studio, project and capstone requirements — full pathway definitions in Part III.

Faculty	Founding programme	Award	Pathways from Year 3 (Music: studios from Semester 3)
Marine & Environmental Sciences	Marine & Environmental Sciences	BSc	Marine Biology · Environmental Data & Monitoring
Music & Performing Arts	Music & Performing Arts	BA	Performance · Composition & Songwriting · Music Production & Technology
Economics & Business Administration	Business & Economics	BA	Entrepreneurship & Innovation · Tourism & Blue Economy
Computer Science & AI	Computer Science & AI	BSc	Software Engineering · AI & Data
Philosophy & Education	Philosophy & Education	BA	Philosophy · Learning Design & Teaching

Music receives three pathways rather than two because performance, composition and production have genuinely different practical requirements — different studio formats, different residency roles, different capstone forms — while sharing one theory-and-musicianship spine; this is the founding answer to a conservatory-grade problem inside a lean institution. Programmes beyond these five — additional degrees within founding faculties, and the Phase Two and Three faculties — are deliberately deferred and mapped in Section 22, so the founding portfolio stays operationally honest.

6. The Popova Core — 48 ECTS, Every Student, Every Faculty

The core is the university’s signature, and it has a deliberate shape: two foundations, then the five cares — one course for each — then one synthesis. Every student in every faculty moves through it in the same order, one course per semester, which means the entire university cohort is always thinking about the same large question at the same time — the standing basis for cross-faculty seminars, debates and joint projects. The Faculty of Philosophy & Education owns the core’s coherence; individual core courses are taught jointly with the faculty whose territory they enter.

Semester 1 — Foundation I: Thinking Clearly (6 ECTS, level 100) Logic, argument, evidence, fallacies, statistics for citizens, intellectual honesty — and verification in the age of machine text: evidence-checking, hallucination detection, and source and provenance evaluation of AI-generated material, as core critical-thinking practice. The course every other course stands on. Artefact: a written and orally defended argument on a contested question, revised after structured peer challenge. Builds O2, O5.

Semester 2 — Foundation II: Learning for Life (6 ECTS, level 100) The university teaches its own method to its students: metacognition, how memory and understanding actually work, self-directed learning, goal design, feedback literacy, collaboration. Built directly on the founding book; students design, run and document a personal learning project. The course also carries the university’s foundational AI literacy: AI as a learning and professional tool, interaction competence, disclosure and provenance habits, privacy and bias basics — so the AI-use rules of Section 14 are taught before they are applied, from the first semester. This course makes every later course cheaper to learn. Artefact: the documented learning project. Builds O3, O6.

Semester 3 — Care for People: The Good Life (6 ECTS, level 200) Ethics and philosophy of life: happiness, meaning, obligation, justice, and the great answers from Aristotle to the present — including the emotional-intelligence practicum: empathy, resilience, difficult conversations, because caring for people begins with understanding them. Artefact: an ethics case portfolio drawn from the student’s own field. Builds O2, O8.

Semester 4 — Care for Creativity: The Creative Practice (6 ECTS, level 200) Every student makes something artistic — a composition, a performance, a text, a designed object — under the guidance of the Music & Performing Arts faculty, and studies what creativity is and how it is cultivated. Non-musicians are the point, not the exception. Artefact: the work itself, presented in the year’s showcase. Builds O2, O5.

Semester 5 — Care for the City: The Citizen and the Economy (6 ECTS, level 200) Practical economics and civic life: personal financial literacy (budgets, contracts, taxes, credit, investment), how businesses and public institutions work, entrepreneurship as citizenship, and the specific economy of Burgas and the Black Sea region. Taught with the Economics faculty. Artefact: a real personal financial plan and a civic-economic analysis of one Burgas issue. Builds O7, O8.

Semester 6 — Care for the Environment: The Sea and the Planet (6 ECTS, level 300) Earth systems, climate, the Black Sea as the shared local case, sustainability in the student’s own field, and humanity’s relationship with other living things — the course through which the animal-welfare commitment reaches every student. Taught with the Marine faculty. Artefact: a sustainability audit of a real practice, project or organisation. Builds O8.

Semester 7 — Care for the Future: Intelligence and Technology (6 ECTS, level 300) The advanced course, building on the AI foundations of Semesters 1–2: what machine learning is and is not at depth, sustained hands-on work in the student’s own discipline, and the questions that grow rather than shrink — autonomy, bias, the political and social life of intelligent systems, the proper role of machines in human decisions, and what must remain the student’s own judgment. Taught jointly by Computer Science & AI and Philosophy & Education, and the guardian of the university-wide AI-use rules applied in assessment (Section 14). Artefact: a supervised AI-assisted project plus a written ethical assessment of it. Builds O4.

Semester 8 — Synthesis: The Examined Life (6 ECTS, level 400) The closing seminar. Each student writes and defends a personal philosophy of their field — what their discipline is for, what they will refuse to do with it, and what a good working life in it looks like. Presented alongside the capstone. Builds O2, O8, and closes the profile.

7. The Project Spine

Across the four years, every student completes a sequence of four progressively more demanding real-world projects. The spine is the university’s strongest structural signature: it is where assisted discovery, interdisciplinarity, community and portfolio assessment converge, and it is carried by the residencies (years 1–3) and the capstone (year 4), so it costs no additional credits.

Year 1 — The Discovery Project (within Residency I, 6 ECTS) Individual work: observe and document one real system in depth — an ecosystem section, a working musician’s practice, a Burgas business, a piece of civic software, a classroom. The skills are observation, documentation, honest description; the output is a documented field study presented at the residency showcase. Discipline-specific framing per programme (Part III).

Year 2 — The Interdisciplinary Challenge (within Residency II, 6 ECTS) Team work, deliberately cross-faculty: teams of four to six students from at least three programmes take on a real problem posed by a Burgas partner or a university initiative — ecological monitoring with AI, festival economics, learning technology, coastal-tourism analytics. The skills are collaboration, scoping, integration of methods; the output is a working result plus a team defence in which every member answers for the whole.

Year 3 — The Public Work (within Residency III, 6 ECTS) Work with and for the community, routed through the university’s initiatives (Section 18): a taught summer module in a Burgas school, a public performance or production, a consulting result for a local organisation, a conservation or sanctuary project, a deployed civic tool. The skills are responsibility to real stakeholders; the output is the delivered work plus the stakeholder’s documented response.

Year 4 — The Capstone (18 ECTS across semesters 7–8) Independent work of professional seriousness, proposed by the student at the end of semester 6, approved by mentor and programme, defended publicly at graduation. Its form is programme-specific — field thesis, creative work, venture, shipped system, taught intervention (Part III) — and it enters the portfolio as the graduate’s flagship evidence.

8. Open Horizon & Interdisciplinary Bridges

Open Horizon is the elective block: six courses of 6 ECTS in years one to three, chosen from the other faculties’ catalogues under the breadth rule (at least three different faculties). Electives are cross-listed existing courses, not separately built ones — designated major courses of each programme carry an Open Horizon variant with adjusted prerequisites and an entry-level artefact — which keeps the catalogue rich and the staffing lean. A small purpose-built set exists only where nothing can be cross-listed — the language and culture courses above all.

The initial Open Horizon catalogue. Cross-listed from the programme maps — from Marine: The Blue Planet: Introduction to Oceanography · Climate Science · Pollution, Monitoring & Citizen Science; from Music: Digital Audio Production I · World & Balkan Music Traditions · Introduction to Performance Practice; from Business: Foundations of Management · Entrepreneurship I: From Problem to Idea · Tourism & Hospitality Economics; from Computer Science & AI: Programming I (as Coding for Non-Programmers) · Web Development · Human-Computer Interaction & Design; from Philosophy & Education: History of Philosophy I · Philosophy for Children (P4C) · Developmental & Child Psychology. Purpose-built, university-wide: Bulgarian Language & Culture I–II · Greek Language & Culture I–II · Animal Welfare & Sanctuary Practice. University-wide courses count toward the six electives but not toward the three-faculty breadth count.

Interdisciplinary links are built into the curriculum. Four mechanisms guarantee interdisciplinary contact for every student: the core (whole-cohort, mixed-faculty seminar groups from semester 1); Open Horizon (individual study in other faculties); the Year-2 spine challenge (mixed teams, mandatory); and bridge courses co-taught by two faculties — founding examples: Environmental Data Analysis (Marine × CS), Music Business & Self-Management (Music × Economics), Educational Technology & AI Tutors (Education × CS), AI Ethics (CS × Philosophy), Tourism & Blue Economy of the Black Sea (Economics × Marine). Each appears inside its home programme in Part III; co-teaching is a staffing instrument as much as a pedagogical one.

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Part III — The Programmes

Each programme chapter follows one template: rationale and graduate profile · programme learning outcomes (specialising O1) · the four-year map (24 major courses of 5 ECTS; core, electives and spine shown once in Section 4 apply throughout) · pathway definitions · signature course descriptions · residency curriculum · capstone · initiative integration · delivery and staffing notes. Prerequisites are shown as (→ requires …); unmarked courses require only good standing at level.

9. BSc Marine & Environmental Sciences

Rationale & graduate profile. The anchor programme: the Black Sea as a living laboratory. Graduates are field-capable environmental scientists who can design a study, collect and analyse real data, and carry results into conservation, policy or research — with the data fluency that modern environmental work demands.

Programme outcomes (O1). Command of marine biology and ecosystem science; competence in oceanography and environmental chemistry; independent field-research capability; environmental data analysis and GIS; applied knowledge of conservation, sustainability and EU environmental policy, with the Black Sea as the reference system.

Four-year map (major courses, 5 ECTS each):

Sem	Courses
1	Foundations of Marine Biology · The Blue Planet: Introduction to Oceanography · Mathematics & Statistics for Science
2	Ecology & Ecosystems · Chemistry of Sea & Atmosphere · Scientific Computing in Python & R (→ Mathematics & Statistics)
R1	Field School I — Reading the Coast
3	Black Sea Oceanography (→ Blue Planet) · Environmental Data Analysis [bridge, × CS] (→ Scientific Computing) · Marine Zoology & Botany (→ Foundations)
4	Coastal Systems & Management · GIS & Remote Sensing (→ Scientific Computing) · Climate Science
R2	Field School II — Research at Sea
5	Marine Conservation Biology (→ Ecology) · Fisheries & the Blue Economy · Environmental Law & EU Policy
6	Research Design & Methods (→ Environmental Data Analysis) · Pollution, Monitoring & Citizen Science · Pathway course I
R3	Field School III — Independent Field Research
7	Science Communication · Modelling Marine Systems (→ Research Design) · Pathway course II
8	The Anthropocene Seminar · Restoration Ecology · Pathway course III

Pathways (semesters 6–8). Marine Biology: Advanced Marine Ecology; Behaviour & Physiology of Marine Life; Black Sea Ecosystems in Depth. Environmental Data & Monitoring: Sensor Networks & Monitoring Systems [× CS]; Machine Learning for Environmental Data [× CS]; Environmental Data Engineering.

Signature courses. Black Sea Oceanography — the physics, chemistry and unique anoxic structure of the university’s home sea, taught on real regional datasets. Environmental Data Analysis — the bridge course where marine and CS students share a classroom and real monitoring data. Pollution, Monitoring & Citizen Science — students run a live public monitoring effort along the Burgas coast, feeding Blue Horizons. The Anthropocene Seminar — the discipline confronting its century; co-taught with Philosophy.

Residency curriculum. R1 Reading the Coast: transect and survey basics, species identification, water sampling, field notebooks — the Discovery Project documents one coastal section. R2 Research at Sea: boat-based sampling, instrument work, lab protocols with partner institutes; the Interdisciplinary Challenge typically pairs marine data with CS teams. R3 Independent Field Research: each student executes a mentor-approved field study — the standard seed of the capstone; the Public Work strand contributes to Blue Horizons or Sanctuary habitat projects.

Capstone. A field-based research thesis with defended methodology and an open-data appendix.

Initiatives. Blue Horizons is the programme’s ongoing source of student projects; the Sanctuary hosts wildlife-adjacent projects; the festival’s sustainability operations provide an applied brief.

Delivery & staffing notes. Theory and data courses run in the standard seminar/studio formats; wet-lab and at-sea competence is concentrated deliberately in the residencies and partner facilities — the classification that makes a field science honestly teachable online-first. Core staffing: marine biology, oceanography/chemistry, environmental data; law, policy and blue-economy courses are natural practitioner and visiting posts; the mathematics strand is shared university infrastructure (Section 19).

10. BA Music & Performing Arts

Rationale & graduate profile. The signature programme: working artists teaching working methods. Graduates are musicians who can perform, write or produce at professional entry level, carry a project from idea to public presentation, and run the business of their own artistic life.

Programme outcomes (O1). Musicianship and theory at professional-foundation level; pathway mastery in performance, composition/songwriting or production; stage and studio craft; collaborative music-making, including networked online ensemble practice; artistic self-management.

Four-year map (major courses, 5 ECTS each):

Sem	Courses
1	Music Theory & Harmony I · Ear Training & Musicianship I · Introduction to Performance Practice
2	Music Theory & Harmony II (→ Theory I) · Ear Training & Musicianship II (→ Ear Training I) · Digital Audio Production I
R1	Performance Week I — The Ensemble
3	Music History I: Traditions to 1800 · Composition I (→ Theory II) · Pathway studio I
4	Music History II: 1800 to Now · Digital Audio Production II (→ DAP I) · Pathway studio II
R2	Performance Week II — The Festival Stage
5	Arranging & Orchestration (→ Composition I) · World & Balkan Music Traditions · Pathway studio III
6	Music Business & Self-Management [bridge, × Economics] · Networked Ensemble: Online Collaborative Performance · Pathway studio IV
R3	Performance Week III — The Curated Program
7	Aesthetics of Performance [× Philosophy] · Production & Festival Management · Pathway studio V
8	The Artist in Society · Recording Project Studio · Pathway studio VI

Pathways (studio sequence, semesters 3–8). Performance: six progressive performance studios — individual online lessons, repertoire, recital preparation, culminating in public recital craft. Composition & Songwriting: six composition studios — from miniature forms through song cycles and text-setting to a portfolio of substantial works. Music Production & Technology: six production studios — recording, mixing, mastering, sound design and scoring for film, games and media. Pathways declare at the end of year 1 (earlier than other programmes, because studio progression needs the time); switching is possible through a bridging studio in the following summer.

Signature courses. Networked Ensemble — genuinely online-native ensemble practice: latency-aware collaboration, remote recording exchange, distributed performance — a course almost no conservatory teaches and an online music programme’s honest answer to “how do you rehearse”. Music Business & Self-Management — rights, royalties, contracts, touring economics and self-employment, co-taught with Economics. Production & Festival Management — students staff real roles in the Popova Youth Music Festival.

Residency curriculum. R1 The Ensemble: intensive in-person ensemble formation, the year’s repertoire performed on an open Burgas stage — the Discovery Project documents a working artist’s or venue’s practice. R2 The Festival Stage: students perform and crew at the Youth Music Festival; the Interdisciplinary Challenge teams typically carry festival production, economics and technology briefs. R3 The Curated Programme: each student presents a curated public programme or production in their pathway — performance recital, premiere of original works, or a produced showcase.

Capstone. A public creative work of professional seriousness in the pathway: a defended recital, a premiered composition portfolio or album, or a released production — each with a written artistic statement.

Initiatives. The Youth Music Festival is the programme’s teaching stage and production laboratory; the Arts Complex (Phase Two) inherits a curriculum already shaped for it.

Delivery & staffing notes. Theory, history, musicianship and production run online in seminar and studio formats; individual lessons run one-to-one online; stage performance is concentrated honestly in the residencies. Staffing leans deliberately on working artists as studio teachers around a small theory-and-musicianship faculty core; the festival doubles as recruitment ground for visiting artist-teachers.

11. BA Business & Economics

Rationale & graduate profile. The engine programme: economics and business for people who want to start something. Graduates can read an economy, run a P&L, build and defend a venture, and operate inside the Black Sea region’s real business environment — with an unusual depth in entrepreneurship and the economics of tourism and the blue economy.

Programme outcomes (O1). Economic literacy at full bachelor level; accounting, finance and analytics competence; management and leadership practice; venture-building capability demonstrated on a real venture or client; regional expertise in Black Sea, tourism and blue-economy contexts.

Four-year map (major courses, 5 ECTS each):

Sem	Courses
1	Principles of Microeconomics · Business Mathematics · Foundations of Management
2	Principles of Macroeconomics (→ Micro) · Financial Accounting · Business Statistics (→ Business Mathematics)
R1	Venture Studio I — The City as Classroom
3	Marketing · Managerial Accounting (→ Financial Accounting) · Organizational Behavior & Leadership
4	Corporate Finance (→ Accounting, Statistics) · Entrepreneurship I: From Problem to Idea · Business Law in Bulgaria & the EU
R2	Venture Studio II — The Startup Sprint
5	Entrepreneurship II: Building the Venture (→ Entrepreneurship I) · Digital Business & E-Commerce · Operations & Supply Chain
6	Data Analytics for Business (→ Statistics) · Tourism & Hospitality Economics · Pathway course I
R3	Venture Studio III — Consulting for Burgas
7	Strategy (→ 5 completed semesters) · Negotiation & Sales · Pathway course II
8	International Economics & Trade · Sustainable & Social Enterprise · Pathway course III

Pathways (semesters 6–8). Entrepreneurship & Innovation: Venture Finance & Fundraising (including crowdfunding and community finance); Innovation & Technology Management; Growth: Scaling the Young Company. Tourism & Blue Economy: Tourism & Blue Economy of the Black Sea [bridge, × Marine]; Destination Management & Sustainable Tourism; Hospitality Operations & Experience Design.

Signature courses. Entrepreneurship I–II — a real venture is ideated, tested and built across two semesters and defended to external practitioners. Venture Finance & Fundraising — classical finance beside crowdfunding, community shares and blended finance: the funding architecture of the university itself as a live case. Tourism & Blue Economy of the Black Sea — the region’s actual economic engine, co-taught with Marine.

Residency curriculum. R1 The City as Classroom: structured immersion in Burgas businesses — port, tourism, retail, manufacturing — the Discovery Project documents one business end-to-end. R2 The Startup Sprint: mixed teams take ventures from idea to pitch before real investors and operators; the natural home of the Interdisciplinary Challenge. R3 Consulting for Burgas: supervised consulting engagements delivering a result to a real local SME or institution — the Public Work.

Capstone. Either a defended real venture (trading or investment-ready, with evidence) or a consulting thesis solving a documented problem for a real organisation.

Initiatives. The festival provides live briefs in event economics; Outreach and the Sanctuary provide nonprofit management and fundraising cases; the university’s own founding campaign is standing teaching material.

Delivery & staffing notes. The most online-native programme alongside CS; all formats standard. Core staffing: economics, accounting/finance, management; law, negotiation, tourism and pathway courses are strong practitioner territory. The quantitative strand (Business Mathematics, Statistics) is shared university infrastructure with Marine and CS variants.

12. BSc Computer Science & AI

Rationale & graduate profile. The builder programme, in the most online-native field there is. Graduates are engineers who ship: they hold full computer-science foundations, working AI competence, and a four-year record of real systems built, deployed and maintained — including for the university itself.

Programme outcomes (O1). Programming and software-engineering mastery; algorithmic and mathematical foundations; systems, data and cloud competence; applied machine learning through modern deep-learning and language-model practice; the engineering judgment to build responsibly, with security, ethics and users in view.

Four-year map (major courses, 5 ECTS each):

Sem	Courses
1	Programming I: Foundations in Python · Discrete Mathematics · How Computers Work: Systems from Transistor to OS
2	Programming II: The Craft of Software (→ Programming I) · Linear Algebra & Calculus for Computing · Web Development
R1	Build Week I — Hack the City
3	Data Structures & Algorithms (→ Programming II, Discrete Math) · Probability & Statistics for Machine Learning (→ Linear Algebra) · Databases
4	Software Engineering & DevOps (→ Programming II) · Machine Learning I (→ Probability & Statistics) · Human-Computer Interaction & Design
R2	Build Week II — AI for the Sea
5	Machine Learning II (→ ML I) · Cloud & Distributed Systems (→ Databases) · Cybersecurity Fundamentals
6	Deep Learning & Language Models (→ ML II) · The Digital Campus Practicum (→ Software Engineering) · Pathway course I
R3	Build Week III — Ship for a Partner
7	AI Ethics, Safety & Alignment [bridge, × Philosophy] · Advanced Algorithms (→ Data Structures) · Pathway course II
8	AI Systems in Production: MLOps (→ Deep Learning) · Emerging Computing Seminar · Pathway course III

Pathways (semesters 6–8). Software Engineering: Large-Scale System Design; Mobile & Cross-Platform Development; Open Source Contribution Lab. AI & Data: Data Science & Visualisation; Machine Learning for Environmental & Sensor Data [bridge, × Marine]; Applied NLP & Intelligent Agents.

Signature courses. The Digital Campus Practicum — students build and maintain real university systems (portfolio platform, showcase galleries, residency logistics, monitoring dashboards) under production discipline: code review, on-call rotations, real users. The faculty literally builds the medium the university lives in, and every cohort inherits and extends a living codebase — an education in legacy code no textbook provides. AI Ethics, Safety & Alignment — the deep course behind Core S7, co-taught with Philosophy. Open Source Contribution Lab — merged upstream contributions as the artefact.

Residency curriculum. R1 Hack the City: an intensive build week on civic challenges posed by Burgas partners; the Discovery Project documents a real production system and its maintainers. R2 AI for the Sea: joint teams with Marine on live Black Sea data — monitoring, classification, prediction; the flagship Interdisciplinary Challenge. R3 Ship for a Partner: deliver and hand over a working system to a real local organisation — the Public Work, with maintenance documentation as part of the artefact.

Capstone. A shipped system with real users plus a technical thesis: architecture, evaluation, and an honest post-mortem.

Initiatives. The Digital Campus Practicum serves all initiatives; Blue Horizons supplies environmental-data projects; the festival supplies event-tech briefs; Outreach supplies learning-technology projects with the Education faculty.

Delivery & staffing notes. Fully online-native; studio/lab format carries the weight, with pair and mob programming in live sessions. Core staffing: software engineering, algorithms/theory, machine learning; security, HCI, cloud and pathway courses fit visiting engineers from industry. The mathematics strand is the university’s shared quantitative infrastructure taught in CS, Marine and Business variants from one team.

13. BA Philosophy & Education

Rationale & graduate profile. The soul programme, and the steward of the university’s pedagogy. Graduates think with philosophical rigour about what a good life and a good education are — and can design, teach and evaluate real learning. One programme, two professional faces: the philosopher who can build, and the educator who can think.

Programme outcomes (O1). Command of the Western philosophical tradition with global reference points; rigorous argumentation and philosophical writing; learning sciences and developmental psychology at applied level; the design, delivery and assessment of instruction in the assisted-discovery model; evaluation and research literacy in education.

Four-year map (major courses, 5 ECTS each):

Sem	Courses
1	History of Philosophy I: The Ancients · Introduction to the Learning Sciences · Academic Writing & Argument
2	History of Philosophy II: Modern & Contemporary (→ History I) · Developmental & Child Psychology · Advanced Logic (→ Core S1)
R1	Teaching Practicum I — Learning to Assist Discovery
3	Ethics in Depth (→ History II) · The Pedagogy of Assisted Discovery (→ Learning Sciences) · Epistemology
4	Philosophy of Mind & AI · Curriculum & Learning Design (→ Pedagogy of Assisted Discovery) · Inclusive Education
R2	Teaching Practicum II — My First Module
5	Political Philosophy · Educational Technology & AI Tutors [bridge, × CS] · Philosophy for Children (P4C)
6	Aesthetics · Assessment & Feedback Design (→ Curriculum & Learning Design) · Pathway course I
R3	The Education Design Studio — The First Laboratory
7	Philosophy of Science · Motivation, Wellbeing & the Learner · Pathway course II
8	Research Methods in Education · Leading Educational Change · Pathway course III

Pathways (semesters 6–8). Philosophy: Metaphysics; Great Texts Seminar (close reading, one masterwork per module); The Sceptics’ Seminar — advanced adversarial philosophical debate. Learning Design & Teaching: Teaching Practice Intensive (supervised recurring teaching in Outreach); Learning Analytics & Evaluation; Education Systems of the World — comparative systems, with the founding book’s country analyses, Bulgaria foremost, as a source text.

Signature courses. The Pedagogy of Assisted Discovery — the university’s own method taught as a discipline: its intellectual ancestry from the Socratic tradition onward, its evidence base, its techniques, its failure modes. Philosophy for Children (P4C) — students learn the established method and practise it live in Outreach programmes. Educational Technology & AI Tutors — what AI genuinely changes about teaching, built with CS. The Sceptics’ Seminar — philosophy as a contact sport, conducted with rigour and civility.

Residency curriculum. R1 Learning to Assist Discovery: assist experienced teachers in the Outreach summer school; the Discovery Project documents one real classroom in depth. R2 My First Module: design and teach an own short module to Burgas pupils under supervision, with structured observation and feedback. R3 The Education Design Studio: redesign a real course of Popova University itself on evidence from its first years — the “first laboratory” made literal; philosophy-pathway students may instead run a public philosophy programme (a city P4C series, a public debate season) as their Public Work.

Capstone. Either a philosophical thesis defended before faculty, or a designed, taught and evaluated educational intervention with measured results — both with public defence.

Initiatives. Burgas Educational Outreach is the programme’s main setting for supervised teaching practice; Health & Wellness grounds the wellbeing strand; this faculty additionally teaches the Popova Core’s philosophical spine, trains all university teaching staff in the model (the internal Popova Teaching Certificate), and runs the measurement loop of Section 20.

Delivery & staffing notes. Seminar-native throughout; teaching practice is concentrated in residencies and supervised online tutoring within Outreach. Core staffing: philosophy (systematic + history), learning sciences, pedagogy; P4C, inclusive education and school-practice supervision suit experienced practitioners. This faculty carries the largest shared-teaching load of the five — the core, the certificate, mentor training — and is sized accordingly in Section 19.

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Part IV — How Learning Works

14. Assessment Framework

The portfolio, not the examination hall. Courses are assessed through their artefacts — projects, performances, analyses, systems, taught lessons — each with documented process, professor feedback against published criteria, and, as the standard for substantial artefacts, a short oral defence: show what you built, and defend it. Every student maintains a four-year portfolio accumulating all artefacts and defences; it is formally reviewed at the end of each year (Section 15) and becomes, alongside the diploma, the graduate’s evidence of capability.

Artefact register. Eight artefact types cover the university: the written argument (essay, analysis, thesis chapter); the dataset study (collected or analysed data with methods); the creative work (composition, performance, production, text); the built system (software, tool, model, deployed service); the venture or consulting result (with external evidence); the taught event (lesson, module, workshop, with observation record); the field report (residency and practicum documentation); and the reflective record (learning-project and mentoring documentation). Each course names its artefact type(s) and criteria in its syllabus — no artefact, no course.

Rigour safeguards. Published rubrics per artefact; oral defence as the default authenticity check; second-marking of capstones and a moderation sample of coursework across seminar groups each semester; external examiners for capstone defences from partner institutions and professional practice. Selective examinations remain where disciplinary knowledge genuinely requires them — the mathematics strand, music theory fundamentals, core scientific foundations — as proctored assessments feeding the same portfolio, never as the default.

AI-use policy. Taught in the Foundations (Semesters 1–2), deepened in Semester 7, applied university-wide. Every course declares one of three AI modes in its syllabus: AI-open (use freely, disclose), AI-bounded (use within named limits, disclose), or AI-closed (the learning outcome is precisely the unassisted skill). Every substantial artefact carries a minimum provenance record: tools used, significant interactions, what was verified and how, and what remains the student’s own judgment. Oral defence makes the policy enforceable: the student answers for every choice in the work.

Grading. ECTS grading against published criteria; the portfolio review adds a narrative evaluation per year — the graduate leaves with both a transcript and a documented account of what they can do.

15. Progression Model

Guided autonomy. The university supports the student’s search without romanticising permanent uncertainty, and states the progression plainly: the early years provide more structure and closer guidance; each year transfers more responsibility to the student; the teacher never disappears. Popova University teaches students how to search well, how to test what they find, and, by the end, how to choose a direction and defend it.

Levels and progression requirements. Courses are levelled 100–400 (Section 4). Progression to each next year requires: the year’s credits substantially complete; the annual portfolio review passed — a structured session where student, mentor and one further faculty member review the year’s artefacts against the outcome domains (O1–O8) and agree the next year’s plan; and, for years 1–3, the residency completed or its supervised local alternative. The capstone gate is the mentor-approved proposal (end of semester 6) and its public defence (start of semester 7).

Skill strands develop deliberately across years. Academic writing: taught in semester 1 (Core S1 and, for Philosophy & Education, its own course), practised in every written artefact, evidenced at thesis level by the capstone. Research methods: introduced inside programme methods courses (semesters 2–3), consolidated in dedicated 300-level methods courses, applied in Residency III and the capstone. Quantitative competence: the shared mathematics strand in year 1, discipline-specific analytics at 200–300 level. Presentation: every showcase and defence, logged in the portfolio as a running record.

Flexibility inside structure. Ownership (Rule 4) is implemented as bounded choice: electives, pathway selection, project topics, artefact scope and capstone form are the student’s; the sequence of foundations, the core order and the gates are the university’s. Students who stumble repeat artefacts, not years, wherever the prerequisite chain allows it.

16. Delivery Model

Every course is classified on five delivery dimensions, declared in its syllabus: [A] asynchronous (recorded material, readings, exercises — supports every course, is the whole of none); [S] live seminar (max fifteen, discussion-driven, duplicated time slots for time zones); [St] studio/lab (synchronous working sessions with the professor as coach — code, compositions, datasets, lesson plans); [M] mentoring-intensive (individual supervision: capstones, pathway studios, practica); [R] residency-required (competences honestly requiring physical presence — at-sea fieldwork, stage performance, classroom teaching — concentrated in the three residencies and never promised online).

The standard weekly rhythm of a 27-ECTS semester: eight to ten live seminar hours, four to six studio hours, one mentoring conversation, and structured self-directed work — full-time study compatible with different time zones through duplicated live slots. The promise “live, small, close” is thereby a scheduling fact, not a slogan: every enrolled student sits in named small groups with named professors every week.

Equipment and partnerships. Courses with physical dependencies name them: marine fieldwork (partner vessels, instruments and lab access via regional institute partnerships), music (student-side recording capability defined in admissions guidance; residency stages and backline via city venues), teaching practica (school partnerships through Outreach). The Digital Campus Practicum maintains the university’s own delivery platform.

17. The Burgas Residency Curriculum

The three residencies are degree components, not summer entertainment: 6 ECTS each, after years 1, 2 and 3, carrying the project spine (Section 7) and the competences classified [R]. Each runs three weeks inside a shared frame: common opening days for the whole university; the faculty-specific programmes of Part III; the Popova Youth Music Festival week, in which every faculty has an operational role — performing, producing, analysing, building, teaching; community strands through Outreach and the Sanctuary; and the closing showcase, where the year’s spine projects are presented publicly. Attendance is the norm and part of the academic model, and competencies classified [R] — fieldwork at sea, stage performance, classroom teaching — genuinely require presence. For students who cannot attend in a given year, an explicit exception policy applies case by case: deferral to the following July is the first remedy; a supervised substitute with the same artefact standard is the last, granted only where deferral would break the student’s progression. The residencies are also the university’s social spine — the weeks in which an online university becomes a physical community.

18. How the Initiatives Support Learning

The public initiatives are load-bearing parts of the academic system — each one names the programmes it serves and the spine stages it hosts. Blue Horizons: the ongoing source of student projects for Marine (monitoring, conservation, blue-economy studies) and the data source for CS bridge work — hosts Discovery and Public Work stages. The Popova Youth Music Festival: the teaching stage for Music, and live briefs for Business (event economics), CS (event technology) and Marine (sustainable operations) — hosts the Year-2 Challenge and Music’s public works. Burgas Educational Outreach: the main setting for Philosophy & Education's supervised teaching practice — every practicum and P4C session runs through it — and the client for Education × CS learning-technology projects. The Community Animal Sanctuary: community-learning site for all faculties (volunteering within residencies), applied briefs in nonprofit management (Business), monitoring and habitat work (Marine, CS) — and the standing carrier of the animal-welfare commitment until the Phase Three veterinary faculty inherits it. Health & Wellness: the wellbeing strand’s applied ground and the student-facing service that keeps Rule 6 honest. This integration is what makes the curriculum visibly belong to Popova University rather than being a generic European catalogue with a Burgas logo attached.

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Part V — The Institution

19. Staffing Implications

The curriculum is designed to be academically rich and operationally lean, and the arithmetic must close. The distinct taught inventory at steady state: 8 core courses; in each two-pathway programme, 21 common major courses plus 6 pathway courses (27 distinct); in Music, 18 common courses plus three six-studio pathway sequences (36 distinct); the small purpose-built elective set; and the residency programmes — roughly 160 distinct courses at full build, of which each student takes their 240-ECTS subset. The full staffing model is computed in the staffing-and-finance pass; it adjusts numbers here, never the architecture. Four instruments keep this teachable by a founding-scale faculty:

Shared teaching across programmes. One quantitative team teaches the mathematics/statistics strand in its Marine, Business and CS variants; one academic-writing team serves all programmes through the core; the bridge courses (Section 8) are single courses serving two faculties; Open Horizon electives are cross-listed existing courses, adding audiences rather than courses.

Phased course development. Courses are built one academic year ahead of the leading cohort. The opening year requires only semesters 1–2: six major courses per programme (thirty across the university), the first two core courses, and Residency I — roughly thirty-two taught courses plus the first residency programmes, growing to steady state over four years. Nothing must exist before a student can reach it.

Staffing model. Per faculty at opening: a small permanent core (4–6 academic staff carrying foundations, methods and programme leadership), surrounded by practitioner and visiting teachers for applied and pathway courses — working artists in Music, engineers in CS, operators and advisers in Business, field scientists in Marine, school practitioners in Education. Philosophy & Education is sized one step larger, because it also teaches the core spine, trains all teaching staff in the model (the Popova Teaching Certificate), and runs the measurement loop. Indicative opening scale: 25–30 permanent academic staff university-wide plus a practitioner pool, growing with cohorts; seminar caps (fifteen) tie teaching capacity to admissions arithmetic explicitly — enrolment growth is a staffing decision, never a class-size decision.

What this model achieves. Every course taught by someone who does the thing; no ghost catalogue of unstaffable modules; and a cost base an online founding can actually carry.

20. Quality Assurance & Curriculum Review

The university is the first laboratory of its own pedagogy, and the loop is institutional. Per course, per run: outcome attainment from artefact and defence results; student evaluation focused on the ten rules (was it discovery? was it real? was it small and close?); professor’s run report. Per year: the portfolio-review corpus is analysed by the Faculty of Philosophy & Education’s measurement unit — attainment across O1–O8, progression and completion data, residency outcomes, wellbeing indicators from the Health & Wellness programme (aggregated, never individual). Per cycle: an annual curriculum-review board per programme (programme lead, core representative, student representatives, one external member) that can amend courses and propose structural changes; structural changes to the architecture of Sections 4–8 require the academic board and the founder. Findings are published — the university committed to contributing its results to education research, and its own review reports are the first instalment. Rule 10 in operation: nothing is final.

21. Accreditation and Regulatory Considerations

This framework is built to be accreditable, and states plainly what that claim covers. Designed with reference to: Bologna three-cycle logic with a 240-ECTS bachelor; ECTS credit and grading conventions; learning-outcomes architecture at university, programme and course level; diploma supplement supported by the portfolio record; QA loop per the standard European expectation (ESG-shaped: internal QA, student participation, external members, published outcomes).

Deliberately not claimed: compliance with the current Bulgarian Higher Education Act and its distance-learning provisions, national programme-field requirements, or any regulated-profession rule has not been verified in this document. That verification is a separate evidence workstream — regulatory research producing the compliance matrix (requirement → framework element → gap → action) — and it belongs together with the founder’s open decision on legal form and accreditation strategy, including the honest evaluation of routes: Bulgarian accreditation, partnership or validation through an established university, an EU cross-border arrangement, or a staged combination. The framework’s job is to ensure that whichever route is chosen, the academic system it must certify already exists, coherently, on paper.

22. Future Academic Expansion: Phases Two and Three

The architecture is forward-compatible by construction: the core, the spine, the assessment framework and the delivery model are faculty-agnostic, so later programmes plug in without redesigning the university.

Phase Two — European Studies · Intellectual Property & Technology Transfer. Both enter as standard 240-ECTS programmes on the identical block structure; their students take the same core and spine. European Studies connects naturally to Business (regional economics) and Philosophy (political philosophy); IP & Technology Transfer connects to CS (what is built) and Business (how it is commercialised) — both arrive with their bridge courses pre-identified. Phase Two also converts residency infrastructure into permanent teaching capacity (Seafront Research Center for Marine, the Arts Complex first stage for Music).

Phase Three — Public Health & Community Medicine · Animal Science & Veterinary Studies · Chemical & Pharmaceutical Engineering. The clinical and laboratory fields join when standing, partnerships and capital permit, inheriting prepared ground: Health & Wellness matures into Public Health’s applied base; the Sanctuary becomes the veterinary teaching clinic; the environmental-chemistry strand of Marine seeds the engineering foundations. Their regulated-profession requirements are exactly the accreditation questions Section 21 quarantines — one more reason the founding portfolio excludes them.

What remains constant: whatever the university grows into, every student of every era shares the core, the cares, the spine and the portfolio — the graduates of 2040 will recognise the graduates of the founding cohort.

23. Public Summary — for the Academics Section of popova.university

The concise public-facing version, ready for the website:

In the Popova University vision, every degree is built around one shared education for life. Students study one of five programmes — Marine & Environmental Sciences, Music & Performing Arts, Business & Economics, Computer Science & AI, or Philosophy & Education — in live online seminars of no more than fifteen, with a personal mentor across all four years. Alongside their programme, every student completes the Popova Core, one real project in each year, and three summer residencies in Burgas. Assessment centres on what students make and how they defend it: a four-year portfolio of real work. The model is structured as four years and 240 ECTS.

24. Current Design and Planning Assumptions

Current design assumptions are: English as the working language, with Bulgarian and Greek academic support and language electives; five programmes with their current pathway sets; the initial Open Horizon catalogue in Section 8; and an October–June academic year with Burgas residencies in July. Current planning assumptions include an initial model of 25 learners per programme — 125 in total — and €4,200 per semester. These figures are planning inputs, not current admissions terms or an offer of study. The accreditation route remains open: Bulgarian accreditation, validation through an established partner, an EU cross-border arrangement, or a staged combination, together with the regulatory research described in Section 21.

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Popova University Burgas — where a student learns their field, the five cares, and how to learn for life — and proves it in a portfolio of real work.