Branko Medic

Here's what the job title doesn't tell you. Alongside Business Informatics in Subotica, Tutin and Kragujevac, I run a research line on learning with technology. In 2026 alone: LMS integration, hybrid and flipped learning and DigCompEdu at COAST in Herceg Novi; digital visual literacies at SETI VIII in Belgrade; Moodle in Central Europe and machine learning for students' C# errors in Poland. Elected Senior Lecturer in July 2026, I also edit the Horizons proceedings.

Every paper needs an affiliation, and this is mine. With the Park as the Serbian partner, I have been a researcher since 2022 on three bilateral projects with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing: self-assessment inside learning management systems (229 students), visual digital literacy (222) and competences in video production (238). Real cohorts, real data, and the occasional Monday morning that tests a theory harder than any reviewer.

In 2021 I crossed from English into informatics at the same college, and the research came too. Collaboration through wikis, blogs and video conferencing went into the International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science, the Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education, Multicultural Education, İlköğretim Online and the Psychology and Education Journal; learner autonomy into the International Journal of Applied Mathematics. Also: lectures in Jiangsu and eight Android apps in Java.

Eleven years of English for Academic Purposes and, quietly, the start of a research habit. In the Horizons proceedings I wrote on virtual classrooms (2010), subtitled video (2012), mobile listening (2015), blogs (2016) and wikis (2018). Then came Edukacja – Technika – Informatyka in Rzeszów, MIPRO 2017 in IEEE Xplore and the International Journal of Management. The academic writing I taught, I was also practising: my MA TESOL at The University of Manchester saw to that.

Five years of Technical English for future engineers, Mechatronics above all: datasheets, PLCs, procedures and the art of explaining a fault to someone who isn't standing next to the machine. It was also where my informatics research began in earnest. With colleagues from the informatics department I published at MIPRO 2017 (IEEE Xplore), ITRO 2017 and YU INFO 2017, and a study of Android app permissions at a national conference in Čačak.

Back at my old faculty, this time on the other side of the desk: Approaches and Methods in ELT, and a great deal of British literature, from Beowulf and Chaucer through Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Brontës to Joyce, Woolf, Orwell and Owen, taught with Glencoe's The Reader's Choice. In the same years I was researching intercultural competence for my dissertation at The University of Manchester, so the seminar room doubled, rather usefully, as a fieldwork site.

This is where it all began: a primary school in Sombor, 2006, children from year one to year eight. Songs, picture cards and worksheets of my own whenever the textbook ran out of steam. And, long before Zoom was a verb, an Adobe Connect Pro virtual classroom with a shared whiteboard, slides and live audio. That classroom became my very first conference paper, on teaching and learning at a distance (Horizons, 2010). Not a bad return on a microphone.

Same years, a second classroom: the British Council. Adults, teenagers and children, yes, but the groups I remember best arrived in uniform. I taught English for Military Personnel, preparing service members for the NATO STANAG 6001 examination with Macmillan's Campaign series: radio procedure, briefings, reports and peacekeeping. Teaching people who already gave orders made me give clearer instructions myself, a habit that has served every lecture since.

Three years, one question: what does computer-assisted learning actually change? My thesis reviews the research on CAL and integrated learning systems and their outcomes in literacy and numeracy. Three papers were published along the way, at MIPRO, ITRO and YU INFO. Defended on 29 June 2018; average mark 9.22/10, 180 ECTS; top marks in E-learning Management Systems and Distance Learning. Recognised in Serbia as a doctorate in computer science (NQF level 8).

It began with a moment most of us skip: pressing ‘Allow’ when an Android app asks for permissions. My thesis, ‘Android applications: identifying permissions that may indicate malicious behaviour’, asked whether that list alone can give an app away. Graded 10 (exceptional), defended on 14 July 2015, and followed by a co-authored study of permission efficiency in Android apps (Čačak, 2017). Average mark 9.13/10, 60 ECTS.

The degree that taught me how research is written. I took the MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Intercultural Education pathway, at The University of Manchester, alongside full-time teaching, and graduated with Merit. My essays came back with small pencil marks beside every sentence that claimed more than it could carry. Mildly humiliating, enormously effective. Dissertation: ‘Intercultural competence as part of communicative competence in English language teaching’.

Where it all started: English language and literature, and a dissertation on the character of Hamlet, graded 10. I still think a degree spent reading Shakespeare closely is decent preparation for reading software, and for reading research. Average mark 8.50/10.