Online education may be the key to developing schools during wartime - founder of Churiumov Lyceum
Online education can solve the problems that the education system in Ukraine is facing today, said Iryna Zhdanova, founder of the Klym Churiumov Scientific Lyceum.
"It is becoming increasingly obvious that education is a matter of national security, the survival of Ukraine. In my opinion, education should be, firstly, networked, secondly, specialized and, thirdly, humane," Zhdanova said at a press conference "What education should be like in times of war: Action plan" at the Interfax-Ukraine agency on Thursday.
According to her, the network approach allows solving the problem of teacher shortages and providing access to quality education in remote communities and abroad. In particular, she reported that about 2 million Ukrainian children are abroad, and only 30% of them, according to UNESCO, continue to study according to the Ukrainian program. At the same time, the quality of teaching technical and natural sciences abroad is often lower than in Ukraine.
"Online education can provide access to quality Ukrainian education regardless of the child's place of residence - be it a border community, Odesa or another country," Zhdanova emphasized.
She noted that for the implementation of this idea, it is critically important to organize hybrid learning, which combines online and offline forms. The example of the Klym Churiumov Scientific Lyceum, where the model developed by the Open Policy Foundation was tested, showed that online learning in natural sciences can be effective.
The teacher also noted the importance of cooperation between schools and universities, colleges and extracurricular institutions. At the same time, according to her, education should remain comprehensive, combining exact sciences, technology and art.
"For example, you study pysanky (Easter egg) in class: you make pysanky and simultaneously study the topic of symmetry, or you make vytynanky (art form of papercutting) and also study different types of symmetry, or you combine music, physics and optics," Zhdanova explained.
At the same time, popularizer of mathematics, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences Iryna Yehorchenko noted that children in small towns and communities often do not have the opportunity to choose a class in the technical direction. Thus, the country began to observe an acute shortage of people with a sufficient level of technical knowledge.
"There is no need to educate a large number of children with such a super-Olympiad physics and mathematics profile. We need regular mass secondary education, which then provides the opportunity to study engineering specialties, IT specialties, as well as mathematical specialties and secondary education specialties - physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, computer science," she said.
Head of the biotechnology department of the Kyiv Aviation Institute, neurobiologist, candidate of biological sciences Oleksiy Boldyrev noted that in recent years the number of people entering pharmaceutical specialties has significantly decreased, and the level of knowledge in the natural sciences has noticeably worsened.
"Indeed, universities need to go down to schools, work with schools, help children who have not received sufficient knowledge due to the weak level of teaching in schools, to put it mildly. This is especially true for physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics," he said.
Another priority, the expert said, was safe access to education in bomb shelters and protected spaces and attention to the psycho-emotional state of children, especially in war conditions.
According to Zhdanova, to implement changes it is necessary to use modern marketing tools, management and new models of financing secondary education, in particular with the support of donors.
She emphasized that the tested model of network specialized education, which the lyceum has been using for about eight years, could become an example for scaling throughout the country.