Innopolis experts approved the project «Digital Department of KBSU»
Director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies of the Kabardino-Balkarian State University named after H.M. Berbekov Albert Shapsigov and the head of the digitalization department of the university Alexander Rogolev took part in the Digital Innopolis Days – Summer Camp 2022 forum on digital transformation in education, organized by Innopolis University At the site of Innopolis University (Innopolis, Republic of Tatarstan), experts from higher From June 30 to July 2, 2022, the issues of the development of artificial intelligence, digital universities, the commercialization of universities and trends in the metaverses were discussed.
Among the speakers were representatives of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Institute of System Programming named after V.P. Ivannikov RAS, National Research University ITMO, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and Innopolis University.
According to A. Shapsigov, the main event of the first day of the forum was a panel discussion on the Digital Chairs project, which brought together about 600 participants. The attendees exchanged views on the details and directions for the development of the Digital Chairs project, as well as the best practices for developing digital competencies. As a result, they agreed that “IT competencies today are already basic skills for non-IT specialists in all sectors of the economy”, “programming is the second compulsory literacy”, and “an IT specialist without industry knowledge is practically not in demand”.
“Digital Departments” are professional retraining programs provided for by the federal project “Development of the human resources potential of the IT industry” of the national program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation”. Both students of specialties related to information technology and everyone else will be able to enter them. At 115 Russian universities, including universities participating in the Priority 2030 program of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, training will start from September 2022 on 300 educational programs. At the digital departments, students will be able to gain new competencies in the field of information technology through additional professional programs and professional retraining programs for the IT profile, which will be developed jointly with industrial partners and industry experts.
On the second day of the forum, during the expert discussion «Digital University and its tools», the speakers outlined the tasks and opportunities of universities as digital platforms for the development of education. Representatives of state bodies, heads of universities shared their experience in the digital transformation of the educational process and, using the example of specific cases, told what services are used in the process of organizing educational and scientific activities, how analytics is carried out, what mechanisms allow motivating students and increasing their involvement in the IT agenda. The work of the forum continued as part of industry expert groups in the following areas: urban economy; extractive industry; healthcare; information and communication technologies; art and culture; manufacturing industry; education; agriculture and agro-industrial complex; construction; transport infrastructure; Financial services; energy infrastructure. In his final address to the forum participants, Deputy Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation Eduard Sheremetsev expressed his confidence that “universities are the basic industry that supplies personnel, thanks to which all sectors of our country will develop. The faster educational institutions form the volume of IT specialists, the faster technologies will develop and we will be more efficient. There should be many, different, good specialists, and most importantly, they should be able to quickly occupy niches within the IT sector. The better we educate them on this, the faster the results will appear in those industries that are experiencing a shortage of workers.” Upon returning to Nalchik, Alexander Rogolev said that the forum highlighted the problem of a shortage of specialists in the field of IT technologies — the shortage in the country is about a million people. In order to solve this problem, universities are supposed to introduce the acquisition of a second specialty in the field of IT in all areas of training. Albert Shapsigov also commented on the situation:
«As part of the Digital Chairs project, during the 2022/2023 academic year, it is planned to train more than 900 students of various specialties (including students of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and digital technologies of KBSU). The volume of training at the digital department is at least 252 hours, testing is carried out on the Innopolis platform. Our specialists prepared a package of necessary documents, on July 5, 2022, the experts of Innopolis University approved and recommended for use the fund of assessment tools developed by the specialists of IICT KBSU for testing purposes».