Today, five clearly defined trends can be identified that have taken shape in education. They are common to all universities and all parts of the country. They concern the educational process itself, the relationship between the academic and business environments, and the global development strategy of Ukrainian universities.
Trend 1: The shift to English
The rules adopted at Ukrainian universities require teaching in Ukrainian. Most students welcome this and, moreover, are quite sensitive about the use of the Ukrainian language. At the same time, however, it can be a problem, particularly for international students, whose numbers keep growing. Every semester, several students ask for lectures to be given in Russian or English. Since a return to teaching in Russian looks unlikely, the way out — one the IT industry itself is pushing towards — is a shift to English.
Trend 2: Polarisation
The polarisation of the education system can be seen both in official documents from the Ministry of Education and in the everyday life of universities. Recent regulations in the field of education show that the Ukrainian system is expected to train people of a fairly low level of qualification. Requirements for young children and schoolchildren are being consistently lowered, and future specialists are gaining fewer and fewer competitive skills. This is one pole, where the interests of most of society are concentrated: most people do not see their children becoming scientists or people with brilliant knowledge in general. They would be satisfied if, in the future, their children could do manageable, well-paid work, even while remaining in third- or fourth-tier roles. Nevertheless, there is another significant part of society that is accustomed to wanting a different future for its children. It existed even in Soviet school times, and today its representatives are ready to fight to raise the level of universities at home to world standards.
I believe that the trend towards polarisation will continue in the coming years, and quite soon we will have two parallel and polar-opposite education systems. This will perhaps be achieved through the further autonomisation of universities. A hard-fought struggle awaits us, the outcome of which will, however, be the peaceful coexistence of universities training specialists of fundamentally different levels. This, in fact, has long been observed in the West.
Trend 3: Merging with industry
Ukraine’s IT industry is concerned about the outflow of young talent to neighbouring countries, primarily Poland. This is making companies think even harder about the sales funnel for their job vacancies among students — tomorrow’s IT professionals. That is why the industry is trying to move into universities, offering its own lectures and practical classes. However, instead of what it wants to gain, the industry will gain experience.
I will not go into detail about the common misconceptions regarding the ability of IT engineers to teach. But I will mention something that perhaps not everyone yet knows: leading American companies have a form of interaction with universities involving the review of code written by students in their course projects. That is the goldmine of IT recruitment!
Internships at Western universities usually last all three summer months, are run by large companies, and are also paid for by those companies in the form of compensation to students. Organising such internships in Ukraine will require serious changes to the educational process, but I think universities will soon start cooperating with market players regardless.
IT companies of any size should also join forces, including to solve problems in professional education. Today, so-called IT clusters have been established in practically all of Ukraine’s major IT regions: Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and Dnipro. For example, the DataArt development centre in Dnipro has, for a year now, been overseeing the education-related area within the local cluster (14 companies).
Trend 4: Distance education
IT companies have long dreamed of universities offering a more modern education. In other words, that students would be taught knowledge of technology during their studies, so that they would not need further training after being hired. But there is no room for this in the university system, and none is foreseen: teaching fast-changing technologies there will probably never happen. A sufficiently agile distance education is capable of realising this dream, one that can close the gap between fundamental university knowledge and the technologies that the modern IT industry requires knowledge of. This is the neutral ground for fruitful cooperation that universities and IT companies have been searching for for so long.
Trend 5: Programming olympiads
Universities competing for students need obvious criteria for evaluating their own performance. In promoting themselves, they are forced to look for a way to prove their worth that is understood throughout the (IT) world. And one particular standard that sets leading universities apart is participation in programming olympiads. Many are still sceptical of this indicator, but I see the growing importance of olympiads as a global trend. Although competitive programming is a field with its own specifics, success in such competitions has generally been, and remains, a fairly objective confirmation of the quality of IT specialists’ training. After all, a university cannot influence the outcome itself: there is an established international community and a system of instant, transparent evaluation, underpinned by forty years of tradition.
Ukrainian universities already have successes at international olympiads: following the example of leading universities — primarily Russian, Chinese and North American ones — they field teams that take prize places in the final of the world championship in competitive programming. Ukrainian universities’ interest in programming olympiads is growing: in 2014, 150 teams from Ukraine took part in the main world tournament; in 2015, there were already 200; in 2016, 240. In 2017, the number of Ukrainian teams reached 265. At the same time, the total number of participants worldwide is growing by 10–20% a year.
IT companies’ attitude to olympiads is also evolving. For several decades, the largest of them (IBM, Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, etc.) sponsored international tournaments. Recently, many companies have started running their own olympiads, formally open to anyone but aimed at the same students and young postgraduates. Examples include “Microsoft Imagine Cup”, “Intel® Modern Code Challenge”, “Google Code Jam”, “Facebook Hacker Cup”, “VK Cup”, “Yandex.Algorithm”, and Mail.ru’s “Russian Code Cup”, although nowadays it is not only the giants that organise their own competitions, but also companies of a more modest scale. Interest in olympiads is clearly growing, both from universities and from the industry itself.
19.09.2017
