Board of Trustees of Kazan University Convened to Discuss Engineering Education

The meeting was held at the renovated building of the Institute of Engineering an April 28th.

Before the event President of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov and Rector Ilshat Gafurov toured the University Clinic's facilities. Some changes have already been made to the working routine since the Clinic was moved under the University’s administration. In particular, customer feedback boxes have been installed in every building. What lies ahead is the hard work of introducing the newest technologies to the Clinic’s practices.

The President admitted that he was impressed by what he had seen – new developments in robotics, material science, and petroleum tech. He even encouraged the gathering to give the University a round of applause.

This meeting, as we have already mentioned, took place at the Institute of Engineering. The building occupies 6,000 sqm and is a home for many labs and centers. The starting point for engineering education was 2012 when the Nabebezhnye Chelny Institute introduced engineering programs tailored to the needs of industrial partners. The Institute of Engineering based in Kazan now works on distributed education and is going to serve as a hub for everything pertaining to engineering. Director of the Institute, Vice-Rector Nayil Kashapov emphasized that his team aims to create a full cycle of teaching, including competencies in prototyping, mass production and creating manufacturing cycles. The same idea was brought up by the Rector in his report.

Contemporary engineering education, he said, has to be implemented with a project-based approach in an interdisciplinary environment. Engineers and students in other fields study together in teams. Each project has a manager, thus allowing students to also acquire managerial skills.

President Minnikhanov opined that this concept is timely and added that there is still intellectual work to be done on how to further develop engineering education.

It was decided that shares of some of the local engineering centers will be transferred to the University's ownership. As it appears, the President is also quite worried by the quality of roads and bitumen technologies. He recommended the attending experts to double their efforts in tackling these issues.

In conclusion the Board voted for awarding scholarships to young researchers.

After the session Kazan University and KUKA signed an agreement concerning the cooperation in robotics and relevant software.