This, among other things, was discussed at a meeting at the federal Ministry of Education and Science on April 3rd with participation from Rector Ilshat Gafurov.
The database will offer e-learning courses provided by all pedagogical universities of the country. A special workgroup will be formed by the federal ministry. KFU's Institute of Psychology and Education and Yelabuga Institute will join in.
Dr. Gafurov commented, “A platform has not yet been designed, and we can probably take initiative in attracting our IT experts to this work. Everything that we do at teacher education departments must transfer to online programs available to everyone. Thus we will show how we create our programs, how relevant their quality is, - and see the other universities' work as well”.
During the yesterday's meeting Minister Olga Vasilyeva emphasized the need for more programs in school psychology, speech therapy, and defectology. Kazan University plans to take action in widening the scope of its efforts in this direction – and their further transfer to e-courses.
In other news, a decision was voiced to return astronomy as a part of general secondary school curriculum since autumn 2017. Therefore, there is now a problem of teacher education in this area. The Institute of Physics, which is now engaged in training teachers in its respective subjects, may soon launch offline and online studies to prepare astronomy teachers.
The work on the abovementioned issues has started, but the exact deadlines are yet to be determined. The efforts will be coordinated by the Educational and Methodological Association of the federal ministry.
Some statistical data for the recent years was also publicized. Educational expenses in the country, as was mentioned, are in the area 1.15% of GDP. The ratio of young researchers (40 years and younger) is up 43%. Russian publications in Web of Science journals amount to 2.41% of the global number in 2016. In particular, KFU published amassed 1,351 publications in WoS and 2,388 publications in Scopus journals in 2016.