Hi, Habr! Four years ago, the Mail.Ru Technopark project appeared, about which we have already told here more than once (for example, here , here and here ). The principles laid down in its foundation proved so successful that in this short period two more similar projects emerged on their basis ( Technosphere and Technotrak ). In addition, we began to launch projects on the Technopark model in the regions. Today, I’ll tell not only about the project itself, but about the meanings generated by this project, about what, sometimes completely unexpected, results can be obtained. But we begin with the idea, or rather the history of its appearance.

Set the task

The premise of the project now seems obvious, but then, four years ago, it was not quite clear. We discussed the personnel crisis. We talked about the demographic hole, about the complexity of recruiting young professionals with the appropriate product IT-company skills, about the cost of adapting them in the company, etc. It seemed that there was no acceptable solution to these problems, that we generally should not focus on attracting young professionals on a regular HR practice. But, as often happens in our company, the word "experiment" has sounded.

What is an experiment? This is when you need to confirm or refute some hypothesis quickly and with minimal cost. What is an experiment in education? This is definitely not fast, since receiving feedback from a graduate is years, if not a dozen years. And it’s not cheap at all, because it is necessary to provide several years of a reproducible educational process when teaching a statistically significant number of students. Nevertheless, we decided to experiment and rushed out to develop educational competencies that were not typical of IT business, together with our first partner, MSTU. N. E. Bauman.
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Formulate a hypothesis

What hypothesis did we test? We thought it was a reasonable idea that if our specialists start teaching students at a good technical college, we will get several important “business benefits”.

• Let's reduce the costs of adaptation (training) of interns in the company through the centralization of training. That is, instead of the “one mentor - one intern” model, we implement the “one mentor - many interns” model, which, all other things being equal, is more economical.
• Increase the loyalty (read - the term of work in the company) of our interns . Firstly, due to the training of our technologies and the production process, and secondly, due to the fact that they are imbued with our working atmosphere.
• Let us increase the loyalty (yes, yes, again about survival) of our interns by introducing communicative practices into the learning process: trainings and team work on training projects (with the subsequent collective defense of the results of these projects).
• We will raise the quality of the interns' work (read - we will reduce the adaptation time) due to practice-oriented training: a project-based approach in education plus an internship in a company or work in a laboratory.
• We will significantly increase the loyalty of our own employees who are selected to teach in our projects. Firstly, work as a teacher is paid in addition, secondly, it is prestigious to teach students of the best technical universities of the country.
• We will positively change the general culture in the company , involving people in the process of training, mentoring and knowledge transfer.

We are looking for a solution

I can not say that all of the following arose immediately and suddenly. Something appeared and died, some ideas were born as a result of random conversations in the elevator. But most of this list is the result of team hard work.

• We teach seriously . Our educational program cannot be simple and / or short. In terms of its content, it should correspond to the goal, that is, there should not be unworked aspects of the professional training of our future trainee. In its complexity, it should be slightly higher than the input requirements of the company to a specialist in this area of ​​training. In other words, a graduate of our program must successfully compete with a specialist who has several years of experience in the relevant field. Now the typical duration of our program is two years, it consists of 12-16 semester disciplines. About 25% of those who complete it end, i.e. 3/4 we deduct in the learning process.
• We teach the best of the best . Our selection should be aimed at identifying not only knowledgeable students, but those who are also extremely motivated to learn and develop professionally. To do this, we must not close on a particular department or even a faculty, we need to create the broadest attraction funnel that will allow us to find the best. Now the competition, which we reached in the Technopark, is more than 15 people per place.
• We teach specific things . We do not want to compete with university programs of study. We consider them necessary, but not sufficient for optimal training of an IT specialist, especially a programmer. Therefore, our programs complement the university in terms of practice-oriented learning. We try to ensure that after each discipline (we last one semester) the student had something that you can “touch”, which you can boast to your friends and family, which you can insert into your resume. We strive for the ratio of theory and practice in our programs to be 30/70, until we reach approximately 50/50.
• We teach the most sought-after . Our teachers - only practice, I'm sorry, from the plow. All of them, without exception, work every day with the technologies that they teach. Therefore, our courses are live, we change (we supplement, improve) them every semester. Therefore, we did not have and will not have the “recipes of the material” and absurd learning tasks about anything. Now in our projects there are 101 (I like to say - more than a hundred) teacher, for the entire time of the project there were 112 of them.
• We learn and learn together . Our students are full-fledged and most important participants of the project, our partners. We do not take money (although we do not pay scholarships) and look forward to a full-fledged and adult dialogue that helps us develop the project. Now our students evaluate each lesson conducted according to nine criteria, at the end of each semester participate in the certification of teams of teachers, work together with us to automate the educational process, are part of the team.

Total (CTD)

Students
In the previous set, this fall, we studied 1206 students. Of course, I have in mind not only the Mail.Ru Technopark based on the MGTU im. N. E. Bauman, but also the Technosphere at Moscow State University. MV Lomonosov, and launched in the fall on the basis of MIPT Tehnotrek. This number includes not only students of the main two-year programs, but also students of the so-called open courses (semester disciplines on topics not included in the main program, but indirectly related to it). And yet more than 1,200 people. Of the three best technical universities in the country. With a competition of up to 15 people in place. Not bad, right?

Teachers
We have more than 100 teachers in three Moscow projects. For four years, only 11 people left the team. I believe this is a surprisingly low turnover rate. Over the years we have done 53 semester disciplines with a total duration of about 3,500 lecture hours. This is a complete undergraduate program, especially when you consider how much time we devote to the extracurricular work of students and teachers.

Online Courses
We do a lot to distribute our programs and courses to all those interested in IT and programming. Our channel contains 820 video lectures. In the last month alone, those interested have watched over a million minutes. Just a few days ago, we launched five online courses together with Stepic.org, five more on the way. We would like to transfer to the correspondence format all the disciplines of our projects, thus making “Technopark online”.

Educational Project Team
The project team is the four permanent employees of the company and four more working on the contract. I am proud that we were able to gather real fans, those who truly understand the importance and responsibility of education as a process of changing the lives of others. It is not always clear how, with respect to 1 administrator for 250 students or 1 administrator for 25 teachers, we manage to sleep, but somehow it works. Apparently, because we like what we do.

Graduates
Our graduates are already 96 people, of whom 88 work in their specialty, 55 of them in our company. Special pride is that eight graduates returned to teach in our projects. This year, one of the graduates of Technopark, having graduated from the Bachelor of Moscow State Technical University, entered the magistracy department of the UMC MSU and at the same time in the Technosphere. It seems that in two years we will have a “double graduate”.

Open Courses
Now, in addition to the three main two-year programs, we have ten open courses, some of which are exclusive. This year, together with NVIDIA, we launched a course on programming for CUDA C / C ++, traditionally successfully at MSU goes on a course on Perl programming (breaking templates, yes), on mobile development (Android and iOS), administering Linux. We work a lot with “non-core” students; we have done semi-annual preparatory courses for basic programs. It seems to us important to give a chance and an opportunity to try yourself to everyone who is interested in the profession. Well, in terms of practical vocational guidance, this is correct.

Lectures and master classes
We hold 42 events (lecture or master class) per year. This is like a big technical conference, both in terms of the composition of speakers and the level of topics. They were visited by about 2,300 people who left a little over 300 reviews. We carefully recorded all the performances on video, put them in public, and also deciphered the performances and published here on Habré (special thanks to the PR department of the company for the care).

Technostart
This year, for the second time, we held the enchanting summer functional prototypes championship of Technostart . About 1200 students of Moscow State Technical University and Moscow State University took part in it, and the final nine teams received 3.6 million rubles for the development of their projects, as well as many other worthy prizes. It is especially important that the idea and implementation of the championship is the work of our students (more precisely, students) and the project itself is being implemented with little or no cost on our part.

Laboratories
In our two laboratories at Moscow State Technical University and Moscow State University there are about 20 students. The guys launched several high-loaded projects, made platforms for all our championships, a project for developing LMS of our educational projects (aka - Technopark portal). This is 3650 commits to GitHub since October 2014 and is completely rewritten in Python architecture. A separate subject of pride is a mobile application for our partner, the project Universarium.org, which the guys have done in three months and which hit the top 5 free educational apps on Google Play.

Regions
This year we conducted an experiment (sic!) On the regional replication of the Technopark model: we became a methodical partner in creating the AIR Developers School of Mordovia and Moscow State University. Ogareva (Saransk). In September, more than 60 students came to the first lesson, colleagues received recommendations from us on the curriculum, we provided them with automation tools, we helped to solve pedagogical problems.

Plans

Where are we going to go? Next year will be a year of stabilization. We ran so fast that it was time to collect stones. First of all, we will do online learning. Depending on the results of this year’s experiment, we will develop or change the approach to creating online courses, but will definitely continue to work on distributing our programs online.

We want to actively develop the direction of cooperation with regional companies, universities and associations. It seems very important to share our skills, knowledge and experience with partners who want to develop IT education with us. Here, a lot depends on the desire of the regions - I think that this topic will be interesting to many.

Continuing to unite the students of our projects, we will expand the holding of our techno-champions, connect the MIPT to it. Already last year, we received more than a hundred requests for this from the Physics and Technology Institute, and I am very glad that now we can implement it.

And the most important thing. We will continue to teach the guys according to our principles. A year later, all three projects will reach the “planned capacity”, two more graduations will take place, and I hope to write something like “Hello, we have 2,000 students” on the fifth anniversary of our educational projects.