How uneducated youth becomes educated. University response
Recently here, on Habré, there was a series of posts about the features of IT education in various institutions of our country. In one of them the Moscow Polytech was mentioned. On behalf of the IT faculty, they decided to speak for their part - after all, the topic of education and nurturing new personnel for the IT industry is more relevant than ever.
It all started 3.5 years ago, when the management of the university, then the University of Mechanical Engineering (MAMI), in particular, mainly represented by Andrey Nikolayenko, decided to assemble a new team for a large-scale update of educational programs and the entire life of the university. Many changes were made - students of the Faculty of Information Technologies are studying under new programs formed by industry experts. Our teachers and practitioners are current and former managers and employees of leading companies in the IT sector. This allows you to fill the program with the most applied subjects. Yes, and the presence in the number of teaching staff of people from the industry allows you to work with companies, providing students with real projects for implementation. Students are good - they can break in skills, companies are also great - get trainees and interns, fresh brains. Soon we will get the first results of our work: next summer we expect the first graduates of the undergraduate program and participants in the large-scale application of new approaches. By the way, we are now confidently using these approaches in almost all the programs of the IT faculty. And although not enough time has passed to no doubt talk about the success of our students in a professional environment, we do not doubt them. We are not in doubt to the extent that we plan to arrange an open defense of graduation projects, as well as attract professionals to evaluate the guys, give our expert assessment. It will be a very interesting experience.
Since we are applying new principles to our educational system in our work on a daily basis, we already have an understanding of what advantages we see and what difficulties we face. We want to share with you.
In the summer of 2014, the leadership of the IT faculty had a serious task - it was necessary to make a quick decision on which programs and how to teach the children. There was a choice - to use gradual updating of programs or to act actively and on a large scale, developing new ones. Since we are not working for the first day in the education system, we understood that the second option is extremely time-consuming and risky ... Nevertheless, we chose it. Now we will explain why.
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At this stage, a fundamental principle was formulated that guides the whole team of development of the information technology department to this day: “We are building a department to which we would not be ashamed to invite our children, the children of our friends.” This is what drives each of us and does not allow you to sleep, if we understand that we did not do everything we could.
When choosing the concept of building a faculty, we were guided by three basic factors:
Firstly, the IT labor market has serious questions for undergraduates and university graduates in IT specialties. That is why a large role is currently played by additional education programs for students, which are implemented by various IT companies.
Secondly, we understand that there is not much point in copying models of university-brands that were built and live on the basis of long-term traditions, research teams and their works.
Thirdly, it was important for us to release students with such a set of knowledge so that they could start working immediately after they left the university. And even better - they began to apply skills at the training stage.
Reflecting on these factors, we chose a way to focus on practice-oriented programs in both undergraduate and graduate programs. These programs were supposed to be unique in content in the country, as well as developed and formed by leading experts from the industry. We call such experts in the framework of the university the Heads of Educational Programs (EPR).
EPR is ideally a person from the industry who knows the industry very well in terms of current requirements, familiarity with key experts, companies and technologies. He is responsible for what disciplines and in what order students will study, what projects to carry out, in which companies to do practical work. He also selects teachers and regularly evaluates their work.
Currently, we have come to the conclusion that for the effective implementation of the program, it is necessary to have two managers of the educational program - industrial and academic. Just because industrial managers of educational programs are people who still work in other companies, they keep abreast, participate in conferences, create their products and develop start-ups. From the point of view of the industry, the requirements for academic RELS are much smaller, but this person must work very carefully with documents and responsively handle all requests from students and teachers. That is, it is an administrative position that ensures the functioning of an already established educational system.
What difficulties do we face in implementing the program? Of course, we were extremely lucky with the leadership of the university, who always helped with regard to bureaucratic issues, so I would not like to whine. Those who work in the field of education understand what they have to face, and those who are not working would not want to scare you :))
We list only a few features that we are constantly working on:
UPD. Unfortunately, the format of the article did not allow to delve into the details, but could not be silent, I really wanted to share my approaches. We will try in the future to prepare more specific materials. Now, if you wish, you can find a faculty group in the VC, where we report on current affairs.
How it all began
It all started 3.5 years ago, when the management of the university, then the University of Mechanical Engineering (MAMI), in particular, mainly represented by Andrey Nikolayenko, decided to assemble a new team for a large-scale update of educational programs and the entire life of the university. Many changes were made - students of the Faculty of Information Technologies are studying under new programs formed by industry experts. Our teachers and practitioners are current and former managers and employees of leading companies in the IT sector. This allows you to fill the program with the most applied subjects. Yes, and the presence in the number of teaching staff of people from the industry allows you to work with companies, providing students with real projects for implementation. Students are good - they can break in skills, companies are also great - get trainees and interns, fresh brains. Soon we will get the first results of our work: next summer we expect the first graduates of the undergraduate program and participants in the large-scale application of new approaches. By the way, we are now confidently using these approaches in almost all the programs of the IT faculty. And although not enough time has passed to no doubt talk about the success of our students in a professional environment, we do not doubt them. We are not in doubt to the extent that we plan to arrange an open defense of graduation projects, as well as attract professionals to evaluate the guys, give our expert assessment. It will be a very interesting experience.
Principles of work of the IT faculty of the Moscow Polytech
Since we are applying new principles to our educational system in our work on a daily basis, we already have an understanding of what advantages we see and what difficulties we face. We want to share with you.
In the summer of 2014, the leadership of the IT faculty had a serious task - it was necessary to make a quick decision on which programs and how to teach the children. There was a choice - to use gradual updating of programs or to act actively and on a large scale, developing new ones. Since we are not working for the first day in the education system, we understood that the second option is extremely time-consuming and risky ... Nevertheless, we chose it. Now we will explain why.
')
At this stage, a fundamental principle was formulated that guides the whole team of development of the information technology department to this day: “We are building a department to which we would not be ashamed to invite our children, the children of our friends.” This is what drives each of us and does not allow you to sleep, if we understand that we did not do everything we could.
The concept of building faculty
When choosing the concept of building a faculty, we were guided by three basic factors:
Firstly, the IT labor market has serious questions for undergraduates and university graduates in IT specialties. That is why a large role is currently played by additional education programs for students, which are implemented by various IT companies.
Secondly, we understand that there is not much point in copying models of university-brands that were built and live on the basis of long-term traditions, research teams and their works.
Thirdly, it was important for us to release students with such a set of knowledge so that they could start working immediately after they left the university. And even better - they began to apply skills at the training stage.
Reflecting on these factors, we chose a way to focus on practice-oriented programs in both undergraduate and graduate programs. These programs were supposed to be unique in content in the country, as well as developed and formed by leading experts from the industry. We call such experts in the framework of the university the Heads of Educational Programs (EPR).
EPR is ideally a person from the industry who knows the industry very well in terms of current requirements, familiarity with key experts, companies and technologies. He is responsible for what disciplines and in what order students will study, what projects to carry out, in which companies to do practical work. He also selects teachers and regularly evaluates their work.
Currently, we have come to the conclusion that for the effective implementation of the program, it is necessary to have two managers of the educational program - industrial and academic. Just because industrial managers of educational programs are people who still work in other companies, they keep abreast, participate in conferences, create their products and develop start-ups. From the point of view of the industry, the requirements for academic RELS are much smaller, but this person must work very carefully with documents and responsively handle all requests from students and teachers. That is, it is an administrative position that ensures the functioning of an already established educational system.
What are the basic principles of our educational programs?
- Each teacher of applied discipline has active experience in the field that he teaches. In our understanding, a teacher who is forced to conduct a discipline, where he has no real work experience, can only give it at the initial theoretical level (as a rule, such courses begin with the word “Basics ...”). But we remember that students need real and relevant knowledge?
- Inside each semester, a student makes individually or in groups a complete IT project, the task for which is formulated by the business and adapted to its competence. At the same time, there are no manuals for project implementation, but there are periodic meetings with the curator from the university and the industry to adjust the results.
- We form the basic skills in the specialty in the first two years, bringing the highly specialized courses to the second half of training. There we transfer a number of economic courses. So we achieve two things - all students, even those who cannot master advanced mathematics, have in their hands the skills that will allow them, if they wish, to quickly find work in the labor market. The second feature - knowing the basics and features of the profession, students master the mathematics and economics better, because they understand where and how this knowledge can come in handy.
- We are building parallel trajectories for the development of students - in the scientific, business part, as well as in the development of communications (SoftSkills).
- Practical disciplines are not accepted by ticket, but through a practice-oriented exam, the tasks for which are developed according to the WorldSkills methods. Within 1-3 days, students should solve a voluminous practical case.
- Update training modules. We try to teach before the formation of competence, and not just to hold discipline and forget. If we understand that it was not possible to teach some skills in one semester, we decide to increase the "credits", as they say in high school, in this discipline.
And now about the difficulties and features ...
What difficulties do we face in implementing the program? Of course, we were extremely lucky with the leadership of the university, who always helped with regard to bureaucratic issues, so I would not like to whine. Those who work in the field of education understand what they have to face, and those who are not working would not want to scare you :))
We list only a few features that we are constantly working on:
- The remuneration of the teacher from the industry is extremely difficult to fit into the countless requirements of the laws.
- Work with partners of the faculty to find teachers, educational projects, examination programs.
- Formation of different trajectories of development of students (in the scientific, technical, business part).
- Methodical support in building new courses.
UPD. Unfortunately, the format of the article did not allow to delve into the details, but could not be silent, I really wanted to share my approaches. We will try in the future to prepare more specific materials. Now, if you wish, you can find a faculty group in the VC, where we report on current affairs.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/339434/
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