Abstract of Aleksey Ponomarev
Talent Identification and Development in Russia: Online Projects of Sirius Center
Aleksey Ponomarev and Aleksey Gorbachev
Sirius Center, Sochi, The Russian Federation
Abstract
The Sirius Center was founded just a little more than 6 years ago. At the very beginning, it was mostly a venue for offline events. But it was absolutely clear that in addition to the offline activites we needed a lot of online events. Why? The first reason is that whereas offline events are good for students, they are only 2-3 weeks long and normally a student participates in such events just once a year. For the good selected students we invited, this certainly is not enough and we have to supply them with something to work on all year round. The second reason is that the number of students we can teach offline in the Sirius Center is limited. There are lots of talents in all regions of the Russian Federation that we wish to support. We need to go bigger. Another problem is the selection. Most of the students who used to come to Sirius Center have already been trained well. As a rule, they came from the leading schools in big cities. So our selection process did not work as a real "educational elevator" as much as we desired. Our talk will demonstrate how we solve these problems using online tools. We will show two models, namely, a fully online one, like MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), and a mixed offline-online one. Also, we will look at the all-Russian olympiad in the context described above.
Keywords: Sirius Center, offline events, MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), mixed offline-online