While Russia is preparing its own electronic system designed to allow compatriots living abroad to remotely receive a Russian education, the leading universities of Russia are gradually joining international remote education systems.
Three Russian universities – Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, St. Petersburg State University and the National Research University – Higher School of Economics – simultaneously became partners of Coursera, one of the most renowned platforms offering online education opportunities.
How does it work? Video course, largely of American and European universities, on various subjects are placed on the Coursera website. Right now there are more than 500 such courses, and the vast majority of them are in English. With Russian universities joining the system, Coursera will now offer Russian language courses.
In mid-February 2014 MIPT will launch the course Electricity and Magnetism and a little later Biological Molecular Modeling on GPU.
Specialists of SPbSU’s Center for Genome Bioinformatics are offering the course Introduction to Bioinformatics: Bioinformatics in Biology and Medicine, but the starting date has not yet been announced.
Lastly, the Higher School of Economics expects to offer in the first of next year 12 courses on economics. Incidentally, four of them will be delivered in English.
So the process has finally gotten moving – only the lazy failed to write about how Russian education lags behind global trends, including with regard to distance learning. And this is true. Languages already represented on Coursera, in addition to English, include Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Japanese, Arabic and even Ukrainian. At present Russian speakers represent only 2% of the website’s users, putting Russian in 9th-10th place on the list. For comparison, nearly one-third (31%) live in the United States, followed by India, Great Britain, Brazil, Canada, Spain, China and Mexico.
Having appeared only a couple of years ago as an experiment, this system of remote learning is increasingly becoming a bona fide method of receiving an education. In essence, a revolution is taking place before our eyes and it could change much more than the education system. If anyone from any place in the world with internet access can study with the leading specialists, then this approach could seriously change the global geography of knowledge. The only major obstacle is the languages barrier, as most of the courses are now offered in English, but with time the presence of national languages will only increase. This means that higher education will become more accessible and less a privilege of the elite.
There are a multitude of models for online education. For example, the Russian program for remote education for compatriots and migrants mentioned above will provide the opportunity to receive elementary and secondary school education as well as take the Unified State Exam and submit applications to universities.
Coursera and the like are largely aimed at receiving supplemental university-level education, with the participants in some case asked to take tests and thus receive attestation and in some cases not.
Among the university programs perhaps the best known online education system is MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The site offers not only professors’ video but also the accompanying written materials. And similar opportunities are offered by many American universities.
Britain has taken a different path, unifying the courses of various universities on one platform under the brand of the Open University. Studying here is not free, but the cost of online courses is significantly less than what it would cost to attend a university in the traditional manner.
At the same time, this entails the creation of a high-tech product, as simply placing a professor’s video lectures online is not sufficient – there should also be a feedback system.
This market is experiencing a real boom. Coursera, founded in August 2012, in several months’ time had already attracted millions of users and more than $20 million from venture investors. The users of another popular platform – Udacity – already number over a million and the project has attracted $15 million in investment. Harvard and MIT have spent 30 million of their own funds on developing the edX platform.
It is clear that such major investments are not being made for nothing: the developers are counting on the profitability of their product. Although the creators of online education platforms declare that their aim is make education more accessible, most of them for now are not free. But not all of them.
For example, the most successful such project to date is the noncommercial Khan Academy, founded in 2006 by the MIT and Harvard graduate Salman Khan, getting by on the donations of philanthropic funds. The academy’s website has several thousand free lectures and practical problem sets on mathematics, economics and other sciences.
Russian universities for now are just trying to find their niche on this unbridled but also very dynamic world market for remote educational services. Russian systems of online education are almost imperceptible. At the same time the potential demand for receiving knowledge “without leaving home” in Russia should not be underestimated. In the future this approach to education could become critical, especially in places where for one reason or another it is difficult or expensive to retain Russian language specialists.
The simplest example is the creation of an accessible platform for the study of the Russian language, including both lectures and practical lessons of various levels of complexity which could be useful to both migrants coming to Russia and our compatriots abroad, their children and even Russian language teachers. Such remote education programs could become a rather powerful instrument of Russia’s soft power, particularly in the CIS and Baltic states.
Boris Serov
