Education

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.

As the COVID curve has been tapering in many corners of the world, education leaders are pondering what the best strategies to reopen schools should look like.

The ‘digital age’ of education has whirled in like a hurricane. Long-term, systematic strategies for the transition to online learning have been swept away by global challenges, and primarily the COVID-19 pandemic and measures to counter it. IOE research fellow Daria Shcheglova reflects on how some students might have been overlooked in this head-spinning rally to take education online.

In 2020, IOE was shortlisted as one of 21 venues worldwide to host this year’s guest Summer Schools held as part of the international Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS), an annual collaboration between Duke University and Princeton University.