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.

While doing their Doctorate at the HSE Institute of Education, students take research internships with IOE’s world-renowned partner institutions as an important compulsory part of the PhD track. Upon returning to IOE after she had completed her research abroad program at the University of Oslo (Norway), PhD candidate Farida Zagirova was only too glad to talk to IOE News on how this internship opportunity came about and what exactly it contributed to her academic career.

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.

On June 5, the results of the semifinals in this year’s KIVO International Education Innovation Competition were announced. Held for the fifth straight year since 2014, KIVO is a joint project between IOE and the Rybakov Fund that aims to support grassroots innovations in learning & development. In 2018, an authoritative expert panel has shortlisted 28 best projects out of more than 500 applications filed. The finalists will first take part in an acceleration summer school to be held in Moscow later this June. The competition finals will get underway in the fall of 2018.