MOSCOW, September 2 (RIA Novosti) – Each September high school and college students all over Russia register for every type of extracurricular course imaginable and young people have an enormous choice of free online academic programs. And while experts believe that online courses won’t replace higher education, they can provide direction to students in their career choice.
Advances in Internet technology have greatly expanded extracurricular and continuing education opportunities in recent years, giving people the chance to learn from the world’s best teachers in a wide range of fields.
All online courses tend to follow the same model. They generally last 6-10 weeks, and include video lectures, homework, tests and sometimes group assignments. Enrollees take final exams and receive certificates of completion.
Online courses are generally free and open to anyone with a high school education, although some programs charge a fee and require some professional training. The relative absence of barriers has made online education increasingly popular all over the world. Online courses hosted by universities and less frequently by large companies are popping up in many advanced countries, attracting millions of students.
Experts do not believe that online courses will replace traditional higher education. E-learning is like fast food in a sense – it may satisfy the hunger for knowledge but can’t provide the complete set of vitamins nutrients that come with the balanced diet provided in a university setting. A 10-week online macroeconomics course for won’t land you a job as a banking analyst.
Nonetheless, e-learning has lots of pluses. It is convenient and accessible for large numbers of people that are already busy studying or working. And online courses can help young people gauge their potential and interest in a particular field, allowing them to enter college with open eyes and to continue their search for the ideal profession.
Established players and new projects
Mass online education came to Russia less than a year ago, but already hundreds of thousands of people have enrolled. Experts believe the number of students and available courses will grow rapidly. In cooperation with the world’s best universities, global leaders in e-learning – Coursera, EdX, Udacity, and FutureLearn – have launched Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for high school and university students and specialists from around the world. Even just a few years ago, it was impossible for these people to imagine taking courses at Harvard, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, Russian online learners face one big obstacle – most foreign online courses are taught in English and few Russians know English well enough to follow a spoken lecture.
Obviously, this gives courses in Russian a substantial market advantage. One international company, Coursera, has offered courses for Russian-language audiences for about a year with the help of three Russian universities: National Research University – Higher School of Economics, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and St. Petersburg State University. Hundreds of thousands of people in Russia have already used its products.
Universarium, started in 2014, was one of the first fully Russian ventures. According to Yaroslav Bykhovsky, an academic supervisor at the company, 20 online courses have been launched in cooperation with many universities and another 30 or more are being developed and will be announced in September.
“The majority of our programs are designed for a large audience. We offer stimulating, inspiring courses on some general topics. We are also working on several courses for college and high school students in a mixed on-site and off-site format. The top students of online course become on-site university students,” he explained.
A role for businesses
Professors from St. Petersburg universities have developed courses on the fundamentals of software development, launching in autumn as part of the Russian educational project Computer Science Center. Unlike previous projects, this one involves entrepreneurs from JetBrains and the Yandex Information Analysis School as well as the St. Petersburg affiliate of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The people behind the venture told RIA Novosti that students of these six-week computer science courses, hosted on the educational site on September 15, will get a sense of whether they want to pursue a career in the field.
“We are launching three courses simultaneously – Algorithms and Data Structures, С++ Programming and Introduction to Computer Architecture." This is bread and butter for any programmer. We think it makes sense to start a career in computer programming with this combination of disciplines,” Computer Science Center Curator Yevgeniya Kulikova told RIA Novosti.
Why are businesses interested in online education projects other than to display a commitment to social responsibility? These online courses are free and don’t last long enough for companies to use them to recruit talent. Companies are probably hoping to help gifted young people get ready for coursework at a university or institute.
“It is common knowledge that the most talented people choose a profession based on interest and seldom change career. Our goal is to help students interested in IT find out about our company, get a job with us and remain with us for many years,” said Andrei Ivanov, JetBrains chief executive officer and the driving force behind the project. The Stepic non-profit educational organization, which is releasing these online courses, plans to partner not only with educational institutions but also with individual teachers and course developers, Stepic representative Alyona Markovich said.
To catch up and leave behind
Online education providers in Russia are still two to three years behind Western competitors, but Bykhovsky believes this gap has closed significantly this year. What’s holding the domestic market back is the belief of rectors at many Russian universities that they don’t need to enter this market. “I think Russian online education has good prospects. We are slow starters but we drive fast. I’m convinced we’ll manage to overtake Western competitors and keep our audience in our online courses by developing quality educational content,” Bykhovsky said. He thinks it is necessary to create several online educational platforms in Russia at universities and research institutions that use the same model of open and accessible courses as Universarium.
“We are not afraid of competition because even the best project can’t handle Russia’s entire educational system alone,” he said. Markovich agreed that although there are several leaders in online education, they don’t fully meet demand. There is still a long way to go, in her opinion, and many in-demand technological solutions will appear on the market in the near future.
The experts have no illusions about the prospects of online education. E-learning will never replace traditional schooling. The best learning environment involves personal contact between the teacher and the student. Still, they recognize the opportunities afforded by distance learning.
“E-learning and mass open-enrollment courses are a very useful in reaching a large audience. They get large numbers of people involved in the academic process and make it possible to identify the best students among them,” Bykhovsky said.
