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2012/SOM1/HRDWG/SYM/005

Agenda Item: 10.3

Information and Communication Technologies in Education: Present State and Perspectives

Submitted by: Russia

/ Third APEC Education Pre-Ministerial Research Symposium
Moscow, Russia
5-6 February 2012


A.V. Osin

Russia

Information and Communication Technologies in Education:

Present State and Perspectives

(Summary of the report)

Informatization of education in Russia, just as everywhere else in the world, has been going on for the last 25 years. A lot of technological and personnel issues have been resolved. In particular, with the help of the “Education” high-priority national project, all Russian schools (numbering over 50,000) have received access to the Internet. The majority of school and university teachers are now computer literate. Almost all Russian universities have started promoting e-learning methods.

We are now faced with the core issues of the education informatization: creation of new-generation educational materials and development of methods of their effective implementation. By new-generation educational materials we mean interactive multimedia Internet resources which expand the array of practical exercises and classes realised through virtual reality.

Today, the Federal Center of IT Educational Resources (http://fcior.edu.ru) of Russia’s Education and Science Ministry has around 30,000 new-generation modules helping to acquire general and professional education. These resources are open and available for implementation in Russia’s system of education and indeed have been used to advantage in some schools and colleges. Our report is supplied with examples of new-generation Internet modules in general and profession education.

In essence the resources lend us an interactive, audio and visual perspective to the studied objects, processes and phenomena. New-generation Internet resources mean the student gets practical skills and competence with the help of virtual reality which imitates professional medium. This is the next step in e-learning which opens up new education opportunities leaving behind electronic texts and separate audio and visual illustrations.

Employing virtual reality for educational needs is rather expensive, however. Benefits of international integration can be hardly underestimated in this respect.

As a practical move to further implement modern internet-based educational content we suggest forming a working group of APEC economies representatives. The aim of the group would be forming a world-wide data base of such resources and working out principles of exchange, localization and issuing of open licenses (of the Creative Commons type).

One of this group’s major achievements would then be promotion of international cooperation programmes that would help to create new online virtual reality educational resources in most popular spheres and trends of professional education.