On October 12th and 13th, a Third International Applied Science Conference titled “A 21st Century University in the System of Continuing Education” was held at South Ural State University.
Every year the leading specialists in the field of additional education gather at this conference and discuss the advantages and prospects of the continuing education development.
The opening speeches at the conference were delivered by the SUSU President, Professor Herman Vyatkin, Vice Rector for Academic Affairs Andrey Shmidt, and Director of the Institute of Supplementary Education Irina Voloshina.
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“Continuous education means that it is a life-time process, that is why we need to look up to the world leading universities and promote this system here. Moreover, the SUSU Rector and the Institute of Supplementary Education have set an important task on increasing the number of students and implementing new interesting programs,” says Vice Rector for Academic Affairs.
Director of Polytechnic Institute Sergey Vaulin delivered a presentation titled “SUSU’s Polytechnic Institute as a Form of Continuing Engineering Education”. The Professor shares his opinion regarding the form in which Polytechnic Institute and the Institute of Supplementary Education should interact.
“I believe that we need to form engineering tasks for our colleagues. Engineering technologies will always be evolving and moving forward, and our mathematicians and engineers should receive certain suggestions from our enterprises on what requires developing and in what way.”
Professor of the University of South Bohemia Miroslav Prochazka also took part in this conference.
“The University of South Bohemia first started collaborating with your SUSU Institute of Supplementary Education within the framework of such conferences 3 years ago. I think that the systems of continuing education in Russia and Czech Republic are very similar since people have a very serious attitude to additional education and understand that you need to move forward within your profession. For instance, one third of students at our Faculty of Pedagogy are participants of the additional education courses.”
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Having been asked “Why do people need to study continuously?”, the Professor gives an immediate answer.
“The labour market is constantly changing, that is why each one of us should update our knowledge to be successful at work. This form of education allows to learn about new technologies and approaches to work faster.”
The Professor notes that the quality of a university in Czech Republic is assessed at several levels. And the most popular criterion is assessment of how successful the graduates are at the labour market. The more successful the graduates, the higher the university’s quality assessment.
Within the framework of the event a teleconference was also organized with Saint Petersburg. The interests of the Northern Capital were represented by the Deputy Director of Private Educational Institution of Additional Professional Education “The North-West Training Center”, Member of Board of the International Association for Postgraduate Education Consortium Svetlana Koresheva. Her presentation was titled “Changes in Professional Standards and Problems of Harmonizing Education Programs and Education Standards in the Context of the Constantly Evolving Professional Standards”. Marina Pavlovksaya, Deputy Director of the SUSU Institute of Supplementary Education, acted as the moderator on behalf of our University.
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Also 3 sections were organized at South Ural State University where participants could discuss the issues of the agenda. The first section featured such issues as: continuing education at university, continuing education of academic and teaching staff, integrating technologies of e-learning into the system of continuing education, as well as mastering the technology of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses). At the second section the issue of continuing education for engineering staff was discussed, and the third section raised the problems of contemporary training of specialists for priority spheres of municipalities’ economy and the ways of solving them.
Once the two-day conference was over, the results of work and resolutions under each section were discussed, and a summary on the conference was drawn up.
“Today knowledge gets obsolete very quickly, so the goal of continuing education is to keep this knowledge up-to-date. Knowledge should be constantly updated in the course of a lifetime – only then will a specialist meet all the requirements of modern production. A competent specialist of today is a professional who knows not only how to create a product, but also how to promote it and advertise it, and can calculate possible risks of its technological process,” notes Deputy Director of the Institute of Supplementary Education Marina Pavlovksaya.