The Project was organized by Don State Technical University and Mediapark “Yuzhny Region”. Guest lecturers of the Project were international speakers: Oksana Tikhinya, Aleksey Lysenko, Yekaterina Borissova and Mariya Grin.
The main concept of the Project is to increase digital literacy among school and college students and to give opportunity to young talents to participate in IT projects competition. The topical range and geography of the Project was very wide. On 18-21 November, 2019 there will be several events involving teachers, students of schools, colleges and universities, as well as heads of schools of Kazakhstan (Almaty) and Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek). Interesting fact: The Project had already been conducted in Uzbekistan, China, Spain, that confirms its international status.
At SDU Speakers presented the project and gave guest lectures for the heads of public schools of Almaty region and SDU students. These guest lectures were mainly based on such actual topics as: Impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the industrial transformation and emergence of “smart” enterprises; Assessment of implementation of distributed technologies and their influence on transparency and cybersecurity; there were also discussions with participants on what is information, how to structure information, the ways of information visualization. Guest lecturers spoke about the ways to generate ideas of IT projects, create business plans and present own projects.
It is interesting to note that the Digital School project is divided into blocks: distance and remote learning, in other words online educational technologies for schools, colleges and universities; the second block gives opportunity to get training materials and access to them with the help of IT technologies, digitalization, programming, the program levels are developed for different categories of learners. The third block is the opportunity to listen to the guest speakers, workshops and trainings on up-to-date areas of digitalization; meanwhile the fourth block is aimed at delivering information to the students on the competition of “Digital School” IT projects, organized within the current project. Competition jury members are the experts from Australia, China, Russia and Kazakhstan. The final stage of competition will be conducted in Rostov-On-Don city. All the participants are provided with equal opportunities, the tasks are arranged by different categories and levels. The finalists of the competition will be provided with flight tickets, accommodation and meals.
The leading coordinator of Consortium of universities-partners of Erasmus+ program for Kazakhstan Gaini Mukhanova highly evaluates involvement of Kazakhstani educational institutions of Technical and Professional Education into the Project.
– The offer to participate in such major event we considered as a very good opportunity to create foundation for the development of digital literacy, it allows us as representatives of higher education system, receive well prepared pool of future applicants, obtaining advanced digital technological skills. No doubts that the Vocational Education and Training project is really important from the point of gaining synergy in educational space considering transfer of our institutions of Technical and Professional Education to credit learning system, as they get more freedom when modeling curriculum, properly formulating educational program in order to introduce new case studies. Educational direction towards digital literacy is one of the key areas of the work of Kazakhstan universities Consortium, – concluded Gaini Mukhanova.
The target audience of the Vocational Education and Training project is the system of Technical and Professional Education in Kazakhstan and building the competencies at all levels and standards accordingly methodology tuning. Consortium directs its work towards involvement of colleges into all modern technologies of educational system and creating an opportunity for further study and professional on-the-job training for teachers.
The DIGITAL SCHOOL Project, organized by the Consortium of Kazakhstan universities, including Suleiman Demirel University, JSC Narxoz University, International Information Technology University, allowed to realize the first unique case on wide announcement of the project prior to its official start (15 January, 2020). At this stage colleges and educational institutions are involved into the Project, further education of the pedagogical staff is being implemented, as well as wide informing, and the main part is that guest lecturers provide qualified content. Gaini Mukhanova concluded that this experience would be transferred to the whole Consortium. It is fascinating that Consortium involves universities from 13 world countries: Univerzitet U Kragujevcu (UNIKG) (Kragujevac, Serbia), Technische Universitaet Dresden (TUD) (Dresden, Germany), Kentro Erevnon Notioanatolikis Evropis Astiki Mi Kerdoskopiki (SEERC) (Thessaloniki, Greece), Don State Technical University (DSTU) (Rostov-On-Don, Russia), Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) (Kaliningrad, Russia), Ogarev Mordovia State University (MRSU) (Saransk, Russia), Association for International Education Support Bologna Club (BC) (Rostov-On-Don, Russia), Certification Association “Russian Register” (Saint Petersburg, Russia), Joint Stock Company Narxoz University (NARXOZ) (Almaty, Kazakhstan), Suleyman Demirel University (SDU) (Kaskelen, Kazakhstan), International University of Information Technologies (Almaty, Kazakhstan), Edge Hill University (EHU) (Ormskirk, UK), Universidad De La Iglesia De Deusto Entidad Religiosa (UDEUSTO) (Bilbao, Spain)