News

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.

Isak Froumin, Head of the HSE Institute of Education, has been elected a fellow of the International Academy of Education (IAE). Until now, its fellows had included only one scholar from Russia – Andrey Podolsky, formerly a department head at Moscow State University, and today, an HSE professor and department head at Innopraktika.

Scholars in various domains of expertise who represent an outstanding cohort of global powerhouses in social and educational R&D met up online last week as part of the inaugural session by the International Observatory for the Transformation of Higher Education, a one-of-a-kind endeavor recently launched by IOE and Politecnico di Milano.

A study by Ivan Smirnov of the IOE Educational Data Science Lab uses machine learning to analyze over 7 million social media posts

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.   

A cooperation agreement has recently been signed between the HSE Institute of Education and Lingnan University (Hong Kong). The parties have pledged to embark on a large-scope agenda in scholarship and networking, with a special focus on exploring cross-national perspectives in tertiary education and advancing academic exchange.

We are happy to invite everyone interested in higher education research and development to join us online during October 29 and 30, 2020 for the RHEC International Conference 2020, ‘Higher Education and Pandemic: New Challenges and Sustainable Responses.’

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.

Dr. Martin Carnoy, a Professor at Stanford University and Academic Advisor at the IOE International Laboratory for Evaluation of Practices and Innovations in Education, has entered the top 10 of the 2020 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Ranking in ‘Economics of Education.’