Studying in spite of Closed Borders
From January 11 to 15, Anastasia Kapuza, Daria Kolygina, and Aynur Kulieva, employees of the International Laboratory for Evaluation of Practices and Innovations in Education, tried on the role of students of a foreign university in distance learning. Our colleagues took part in the VU Graduate Winter School. The university offered to attend one of 18 courses to choose from in a distance format - from programming in Python to philosophy of Africa. Listeners from countries from all over the world participated in discussions, worked in groups, and attended additional events of the university for networking, but with one important difference - all events were held online: Canvas instead of a classroom, Zoom instead of a coffee break.
Feedback from our people:
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Research Fellow |
“I was taking the Automated Content Analysis using Python course, and it was interesting for me to be a student in such a technical course since I teach a similar discipline at the Institute of Education. As a result, I enjoyed the school both as a student, as I received a lot of materials and useful information, and as a teacher, because I got a chance to "spy" the work of foreign colleagues. I am glad that even in such a difficult period of the pandemic, training remains available, and there is an opportunity to improve your skills. In particular, I have learned such necessary skills in the age of big data as downloading data from sites and analyzing large volumes of texts. " | |
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Research Intern |
“At the Winter School on Network Econometrics, I immersed myself in the theoretical study of econometrics of networks. My fellow students and I listened to advanced lectures on this topic, as well as solved practical problems using Matlab, which was new to me. It was an interesting experience because my level of knowledge was not high enough to grasp on the fly all the points that we discussed in class. However, I realized for sure that I needed to understand this topic more thoroughly because the tools of spatial econometrics now seem to me very useful and suitable for the research that we conduct and plan in the Laboratory. In the future, I would like to take part in schools in an offline format, since this format, due to a change in the situation, allows you to reboot and tune in exclusively to learning and networking for both the participants and the teachers of the school. " | |
| Aynur Kulieva Research Intern | “Not only students interested in studying education, but also graduate students in such areas as medicine, international relations, criminology, signed up for the course on qualitative analysis, which I attended at the Winter School. Each group corresponded to a certain direction: I got into the Social Sciences group, where I ended up with three educational researchers and one historian. Every day, we discussed future research and the specifics of qualitative data analysis methods, coded interviews and categorized them. We could ask any questions to the teachers. We have been provided with a wealth of literature that I can use in my research and future dissertation. I also took part in a side event, networking, met with students from the USA and Belgium. Of course, online communication cannot be compared with live communication, but I am glad that I had the opportunity to participate in this Winter School. " |