“Teachers from villages and cities will form virtual communities in the “Electronic Education”.

In an interview to Tatar-Inform agency, RT Government Vice-Premier – Minister of Informatization and Communication Nikolai Nikiforov told about prospects of electronic education development in Tatarstan, realization of the presidential initiative on providing teachers with laptops, schools – with new hardware. He also shared hopes for implementation of innovation in the educational process of the young generation.

Nikolai Anatolyevich, the projects “Computer to School” and “Computer to Teacher” started in Tatarstan within the presidential initiative. 450 million rubles have been allocated for realization of the projects this year. Has delivery of hardware to republican schools started; it is expected to have been finished by the Pedagogical Council, which is to take place on August 20 in Nizhnekamsk.

N.N.: The delivery procedures are in full swing. Approximately 4,000 new computers had been delivered to republican schools by July 28 evening. Laptops will be granted to teachers (almost 13,000 te4achers are to receive them) in the very near future. Everything is going according to the schedule.

It was informed that all Tatarstan schools (about 2,300) would get access to the Internet by fiber-optic communication channels within two years. 47 schools have been connected to the “fiber” Internet so far, 30 more are to have been connected by September 1.

N.N.: We provide “fiber-optic” Internet access to schools not only in Kazan, but in all Tatarstan regions. Usually the largest schools on the republican regions are chosen. But it should be taken into account that different opportunities are available at different schools. For example, 100,000 rubles is enough to provide the Internet connection for one school, while the other one requires 2,5 million.

Did all the schools switch to the so-called “regional Internet” (which is finances not from the federal budget, but from the Russian Federation regions’ budget)?

N.N.: It was the beginning of the last year when our schools switched to the Internet which is paid for from the republican budget. But all large schools are connected to the broadband Internet.

Tatarstan had certain advantages in financing the process of switching the school Internet access from the federal to the republican budget – we just connected educational institutions to our own government network that already existed by that moment. Unfortunately, many regions still have problems as the federal center controls whether they’ve announced the tender. The infrastructure we had opened opportunities for tackling the problem easily.

A lot has been said about irrational usage of the school Internet by schoolchildren. Has any additional filtration of the content been implemented this year?

N.N.: We have been attentively monitoring usage of the school Internet since 2009. Since “the big Internet temptations” for schoolchildren – entertainment websites, social networks - have appeared, education hasn’t created anything like this. We’ve worked on the project “Electronic Education” for two years. Now it’s being launched in full scale as part of the campaign of granting laptops to all schoolteachers as they become the process participants.

About 50,000 schoolchildren have been registered in the system “The Republic of Tatarstan Electronic Education”. There are some 400,000 schoolchildren and almost 40,000 teachers in the republic. 400-450 thousand people of our region are expected to use the system on a regular basis.

What does Tatarstan benefit from the implementation of the system “Electronic Education”?

N.N.: It is a venue for communication. As I see it, the main result is equalizing opportunities of studying in a city and in the countryside, at a large or a small school. Schoolchildren and teacher swill have an opportunity to communicate at one common level in the electronic educational space.

That means the system will remind a social network, but in the educational space?

N.N.: Well yes, to some extent. But in this system, everything will be open, everyone will use his/her real name. The system also aims at including interactive classes in the educational process. We believe that schoolchildren will have a chance to talk to university professors, teachers from different villages and cities of the republic will form virtual communities. It will be a new impetus for improving the quality of education.

By Kristina IVANOVA

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