Education

On April 9, the fourth session of IOE’s Fast-track Seminar Series in Education R&D 2021 will feature an open expert talk titled, ‘Teaching TRIZ [Theory of Inventive Problem Solving] in Primary School: An Iranian Case Study.’

The HSE Institute of Education has opened a Joint Department with Skyeng to create faster and more effective tools in online education, research, and specialist training in the field of educational technology.

IOE experts Evgeniia Shmeleva and Isak Froumin have recently come up with a paper that analyzes factors that are primarily responsible for undergraduate churn in programs of computer science and engineering education. The research draws upon a massive sample of more than 4,000 STEM students at 34 universities across Russia. Using this study as the starting point, we have set out to further elaborate on the topic, with student attrition representing an ever-pressing challenge for the global university realm. It turns out there is a particularly strong link between the amount of academic capital one was able to build up by school completion (as expressed by the score on the K–11 Unified State Exam) and one’s odds of successfully making it through the university coursework.

In December 2020, IOE expert Ulyana Zakharova took part in the eSTARS international conference of e-learning stakeholders, a joint initiative between HSE and Coursera, where she presented at a special session on sociology of higher education. In an interview with the HSE News Desk, Ulyana shared about how students’ prowess in key components of personal agency, such as self-efficacy, initiative, and self-direction, are related to their ability to adapt to and perform in distance education.

The pros and cons surrounding the migration of schools to remote learning amid policies to tame COVID-19 have been a site of starkly polarized debate since the very inception of the pandemic back to the spring of 2020. Stakeholders in general education – students, teachers, families, and institutional leaders – have all voiced their own and widely varying concerns about how K–11 schooling has been unfolding in the digital realm. These include fears over how well the learning process is being administered overall, a lack of adequate infrastructure and resources, disparities in how comfortable teachers and students have felt adapting to novel instructional and learning models as well as how they have been able to handle a surge in workloads, and growing unease over the quality of educational outcomes. Now that we are almost a year on since the COVID emergency took hold, IOE experts have set out to take stock of the lessons that we have learned so far from doing remote schooling in crisis times.

Recent times have witnessed actors in learning & development express more enthusiasm about game and simulation as important ingredients of educational tools that can engage and empower students so they become better prepared to learn and live in the 21^st century. Earlier in September, Brighton, UK welcomed researchers, edutainment designers, and other stakeholders in education through play for the 15th European Conference on Game Based Learning (ECGBL). Marina Scherbakova of the IOE Laboratory for Advanced Measurements and Test Design was also taking part in the Conference sessions to share her experiences of working on a project team to develop a sci-fi educational game for mid-schoolers.   

What are the hallmarks of future-proof education? How do minors benefit students? How will people interact with machines? These were some of the topics that HSE Rector and IOE Academic Supervisor, Yaroslav Kuzminov addressed in a recent conversation with Elena Bunina, General Director at Yandex Russia.

While a good deal of students readily embraced online learning, there were also many of those who felt less comfortable completing their coursework remotely due to technical difficulties. First-year students had the hardest time adapting to the new format, and low-income students also encountered many challenges. These are some of the findings from a joint survey conducted by IOE, the HSE Centre for Institutional Research, and the Institute of Distance Education at Tomsk State University.

In an interview with Forbes, HSE Rector and Supervisor for Education, Yaroslav Kuzminov spoke about digital learning and what he thinks the future holds in store for universities.

The new volume titled, Audacious Education Purposes: How Governments Transform the Goals of Education Systems, which has recently been published in open access by Springer, foregrounds cases of educational change to promote 21^st-century outcomes across eight nations. A chapter on Russian reforms aimed at future-proofing education in a fast-paced world has been prepared by Head of IOE, Isak Froumin and Rector of Moscow City University, Igor Remorenko.