Updated online courses Mail.Ru Group and interviews with their creators

In December and February on the IT.Mail.Ru portal , in partnership with Stepic, we launched online courses based on materials from Technosphere, Technopark and Tehnotrek projects. To date, we have conducted training in three courses:

• 3370 people enrolled in the course “Algorithms and Data Structures”, 145 people successfully completed training, 105 of them with honors;
• 2400 people enrolled in the course “The preparatory program for programming in C / C ++”, 140 people completed the training, 106 of them - with honors;
• 4370 people enrolled in a course on security analysis of web projects, 560 users completed the training, 330 of them with honors.

Moreover, we finalized the program and re-opened registration for some courses!

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In this post we want to share with you an interview of project participants. We asked the ideological mastermind, Dmitry Voloshin, director of research and education at Mail.Ru Group, as well as our teachers. Read the interview with them under the cut.



Why did you decide not to limit yourself to recording videos from lectures of educational projects, but to create full-fledged courses with assignments, grades and certificates?



Dmitry Voloshin: It seems to us that for almost five years of implementing the Technopark project at the Moscow State Technical University and two years of the Technosphere at Moscow State University, we managed to create and work out very high-quality disciplines. And modern IT training is first of all project work, it is a solution to practical problems. And we always wanted to share our success stories with the community. It was at the intersection of these desires and possibilities that the idea arose of making full-fledged courses, transferring our practical tasks and ways to test and evaluate them online.



What difficulties arose when organizing course registration? How were they solved?



D. V.: Yes, there were no serious difficulties. Our partners from Stepic have a very sensible approach to recording courses, they constantly worked with our teachers and helped them in all situations. Stepic developers promptly added the platform code, implementing the necessary task verification functionality.



How can you evaluate the effectiveness of the project? Are there any quantitative goals or is it enough just to understand the involvement in raising the education level of the IT community?



D. V.: The main goal is to transfer our knowledge and experience in teaching the IT community. Last year alone, I received about six thousand letters asking me to create these courses. I think that such a number of satisfied developers, future and present, is already a good result.



What are your plans for the project for this year?



D. V.: We will continue to create courses. Now, out of 48 unique disciplines, we have transferred only 12 to online courses (a few are preparing for release right now). There are ideas how to improve existing courses, how to develop a system for checking tasks. In general, we see from the community reviews that this project has been very successful.



We also found it interesting what the teachers themselves say about their participation in the courses and how they perceive the project.



Why did you decide to participate in the recording of the online course?



Valentina Glazkova: I was offered to record a course after several starts of it live, and there was an opportunity to organize a recording in the summer during my vacation from another job, so I was able to give it enough time.



Yaroslav Rabovolyuk: It was interesting to get experience in this format. In general, it is useful.



Dmitry Kalugin-Balashov: I wanted money. :) They pay for it.



What are your feelings compared to giving lectures and conducting seminars live? Easier, harder, or just completely different?



VG: Compared to conducting classes in person, it was more difficult for me. It is very important for me to feel the response, the reaction of the audience - the toy that was lying on the camera could not fully provide me with this feeling. When you tell the listeners directly, time somehow passes easily, quickly and imperceptibly, but here everything was different.



Ya. R.: Quite different. There is always live feedback. Here it is limited to text only.



DK-B .: More difficult. I always contact with the audience, but I don’t talk much to the camera ... Uncomfortable.



What were the difficulties and peculiarities in recording the course and working in the studio in general?



V. G.: I don’t recall any difficulties at all, the studio in Moscow-City is very well equipped. Of the peculiarities, unless you don’t have time to finish the lecture on one of the days, then you should come to the next record in the same clothes as on the previous day.



Ya. R .: Unmoderated video recording. On the one hand, this is good, no one bothers to overwrite one fragment even ten times, on the other - you, except you, nobody sees, who knows - maybe all ten times you carry complete garbage. :) Come up with tasks that are sufficiently formalized for automatic verification, but interesting at the same time - that is another task.



DK-B .: I recorded at night, until four or six in the morning.



Are you able to devote enough time to checking students' work and answering their questions?



VG: As much time as I would like, unfortunately, it was not always possible to pay: the course started after my vacation. I tried whenever possible to respond promptly.



Ya. R .: I did this in my free time. Every night, regularly. But, as it turned out, the guys answer each other themselves, my function came down mostly to refining their answers, directing them in the right direction and erasing obvious spoilers.



DK-B .: Honestly, no. But I try.



Is the format of online courses informative and responsive to users?



V.G .: I think that the format is quite informative, but at the same time it requires the listeners to have a good self-organization and a strong interest in the process. When for some reason there is no opportunity to listen to the on-board course - this is a good tool for the rapid development of something new.



JR: Informative, in my opinion. Does it answer? Watching what requests. :) It all depends on ... First of all - on tasks. I'm not even talking about my course right now. In the end, the Internet is large - knowledge on any topic can be obtained in many places, if you are interested enough. Where to apply them then? How? I myself try to be in good shape and take courses on completely different topics, not even related to IT, on Coursera, Udacity and other platforms, the most interesting and useful just in practice.



DK-B .: I do not know ... Students are different. I myself continuously study in two or three courses, and it helps me a lot.



What would you recommend to those who are enrolled in courses and to those who are thinking about whether to take part in them?



V.G .: I would like to recommend to participate, it is very conducive to professional self-development and the development of modern technologies.



Ya. R.: Nothing comes to mind.



JK-B .: Just do it!



What courses, in your opinion, is not enough? What are the current development issues unfairly remain in the shadows?



Ya. R.: IoT. More AI, more! Himself with a good course on OpenGL ES / WebGL played with pleasure.



DK-B .: Microcourses (for one or two weeks), devoted to one problem.



Share the fact that you remember while working with the online course.



VG: A huge flow of questions in the first hour (at eight in the morning) on ​​the first day of launching the course.



Ya. R .: Hmm ... An unexpected question is what kind of hours does the teacher have? :) Fossil, I do not remember the model. Not for publicity.



DK-B .: I put a plush toy on camera and told her my course. :) Without it, it was not possible to look at the camera at all.



***

In conclusion, we remind that we opened the entry for the course on web project security analysis , which is taught by Yaroslav Rabovolyuk, and on the preparatory program for C / C ++ programming by Valentina Glazkova. Registration for courses is made through the IT.Mail.Ru portal.