News

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.

At a recent webinar held as part of IOE’s Year 2019/20 Series on Educational R&D, Ivan Smirnov, Head of the IOE Laboratory for Educational Data Science presented about how students’ ‘digital footprints’ can help leverage our understanding of mental well-being in adolescents and the way it is related to academic achievement.

Experts at the HSE Laboratory for Media Communications in Education have come up with findings from a large-scale survey they have conducted in association with the HSE Institute of Education, which aimed to gauge how well school teachers have been able to transition online amid Covid-19 directives that have temporarily shut down conventional learning. In all, 22,600 teachers from 73 Russian regions have been interviewed. The results propose that the overall assessment of how comfortable the Russian teacher corps have found themselves taking instruction to the digital dimension is more optimistic than what was first thought back to when schools had just set about moving online.

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.

The HSE April International Academic Conference is held in a distributed format this year, with some sessions broadcast online and papers and video presentations from others posted on the conference website. Dr Ger Graus, a Guest Professor at IOE and Global Director of Education at KidZania, is an invited speaker for a special session on ‘Digital Transformation of Education’ that is also conducted in this new distributed form. His paper explores how we can better prepare children to learn and live in the digital era through non-formal education.

The Covid-19 pandemic has propelled universities to switch to online learning, which will probably foster the development of online higher education. IOE researchers joined forces with their American colleagues to demonstrate, based on a representative sample of STEM students, that online learning at university can be as effective as traditional in-person training.

What helps and what hinders access to good education in Russian regions

As the global COVID-19 outburst keeps tightening its grip across the dimensions of life, educational institutions worldwide have increasingly sought to migrate to the digital realm amid social distancing policies to flatten the coronavirus curve. In these circumstances, exploring ways to make the utmost of what modern ICT offer for sustaining academia in times when conventional modes of leaning and networking are on hold has become an imperative as vital as perhaps never before. A webinar held earlier this week as part of the IOE 2019/20 series on ‘Educational R&D’ brought together academic leaders and experts from Russia, China, and the U.S. to share best practices in taking university programs online.

The HSE University has climbed three places year-on-year to list 110^th in the newly released QS World University Rankings in ‘Education’ 2020, another all-time high for a Russian university in this subject area.

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.