The first meeting of the IOE Visiting Committee, which includes six international experts in education from five countries alongside three Russian experts, was held on October 19–20. The Committee gave independent assessments with respect to multiple areas of the Institute's academic profile, which will serve as important groundwork for refining and reinforcing IOE’s Development Strategy through 2024.

Topics of resilient schools and how such L&D settings can be best created to empower less privileged student cohorts have recently piqued more interest among educational scholars and within broader public realms. Marina Pinskaya, Sergey Kosaretsky, Roman Zvyagintsev and Mikhail Goshin, experts at the IOE Center for Socioeconomic Aspects of Schooling, traveled to Italy’s Bolzano this September to take part in the 2018 ECER International Conference, where they presented about IOE’s research on resilient K-11 settings.

Flexibility and personalization are universally recognized as the key hallmarks of 21^st century learning, but how do we go about implementing these principles in practice? At Arizona State University (ASU), which ranks among top U.S. institutions by technology and innovation, it is an advanced AI framework of adaptive learning that reigns supreme, enabling student-centric strategies that are best tailored to one’s personality traits, aptitudes and educational needs. IOE Head Isak Froumin has talked to Dale Johnson, EdPlus Manager at ASU, about what makes this adaptive learning system tick and how it contributes to effective learning.

Can basic income help even out inequality by empowering the less privileged? How should education be overhauled and what skills will become central to the human capital of tomorrow? Is Life-long Learning in fact set to spark a greater momentum for social mobility? Dr. Isak Froumin, Head of the HSE Institute of Education, and Dr. Philippe Van Parijs, a co-founder of the Basic Income European Network, addressed these and other topics of building a sustainable, better future for everyone during a special session held as part of this year’s ‘OSTROV 10–21’ international foresight forum in Vladivostok, Russia.

This July, IOE welcomed the Second International Summer School ‘Inequality of Educational Opportunities.’ In 2018, the Summer School aimed to comprehensively address the most relevant scholarship frameworks that explore various factors and contexts of socioeconomic inequalities in education.

The year 2018 marks an important addition to IOE’s learning and networking agenda as a new International Summer School on modern L&D design and instructional practices made its debut early this July.

On June 9–15, the town of Pushkin near St. Petersburg, Russia hosted IOE’s Sixth International Summer School on Multidisciplinary Higher Education Research. Bringing together a premier cohort of accomplished international academics and bright early-career scholars, the 2018 School aimed to take new and deeper perspectives on how higher education can contribute to positive socio-economic change at all levels.

As part of the 2018 Gaidar Economic Forum that was held in Moscow on January 16–18, HSE Rector and Supervisor for Education, Yaroslav Kuzminov, spoke about the changing face of schooling in the digitally driven world and what policy incentives are required to best support this transitional momentum.