Get best of the week

VK Fellowship fellows talk about the future of distance learning, discipline and socialization

Distance learning is the trend of spring 2020. We asked three VK Fellowship fellows , participants in the program for authors of programming and computer science courses, whether it is difficult to go far away and how this experience will affect the education system in the future. Maybe you need to leave it this way?

According to teachers, it is important to find a convenient educational platform, think over the issue of socialization and make friends with Educational data mining.

Details - under the cut.




VK Fellowship — ( -), . 15 2020 120 , . 17 .

, .


. . .



You can go to distance learning with students smoothly, if server resources allow. This applies to all disciplines. Through good video lessons, the essence of the subject can be conveyed to even more students than in the classroom: you can watch the video in accelerated mode and return to recording later. But online learning has its drawbacks: unfortunately, students can easily crack testing systems with collective intelligence - share the results with classmates. To write off failed, the teacher has to develop additional options - but not all sites allow them to be placed.

I do streams with schoolchildren, now about an hour every day. During this time, we have time to analyze one exam in computer science from the collection of Polyakov. I would like to add another stream per day for other exam tasks.

But as a university teacher, it's hard for me to switch to distance learning. In fact, you have to develop a whole course in a new form in order to publish it on the university platform. I do this for the first time, delve into a lot on the go and sometimes I have to use far from the best solutions. Moreover, no one pays extra for such work, and my salary is on hand 6,300 rubles a month for my 0.25 rate. Now you need to do a full course on functional programming in F #. I read it for the first year. While we work like this: the guys perform laboratory, I spend closed streams with them.



Generally speaking, the Ministry of Education and Science obliged universities to lay off staff to increase efficiency. With the transfer of all to distance learning, it will be easier to fulfill the set KPIs: for universities and the remaining teachers. The hardest thing for schools and schoolchildren - for them, the transition will be very painful.

Will there be enough online courses, without schools and circles, is a difficult question in the context of the current situation. It can last even a year if serious complications occur after infection. And therefore it is worth thinking about socialization - I think it is definitely needed. But what will she become? Parenting is effective in a group, and in this sense, online meetings do not completely replace live communication. I think we still do not understand what we will lose if socialization takes place only on the network.

But we can also get something new: I think it will be connected with Data Science - processing data arrays. There is already a direction of Educational data mining - it allows you to calculate which form of content is more understandable to the student, as well as easily notice those who are cheating.

Marina Pankova, Samara


Computer science teacher at the Samara Lyceum of Information Technology. He teaches in a free circle for schoolchildren, where he teaches them the Python and C ++ languages. The program is designed for three years. Pupils of grades 6–8 who have proven themselves in the Olympiads or in a school programming course can join it.




There are several factors that are important for distance learning. The first is disciplinary. Pupils do not wake up to the beginning of classes, they are looking for excuses: the computer broke down, there was no Internet, parents were taken to the village. Adults also do not always understand the difference between sitting at home on vacation and distance learning. Overcoming these difficulties takes a lot of time and effort. I have to write to children and parents, explain and talk.

The second factor is the communication interface. For fruitful work in the lesson you need feedback. Organizing it for each group of students is another problem. I have it organized like this:
  • there are contacts and conversations VKontakte for classes and programming circles;
  • there are children who are not in VK. For them, I duplicate everything in a group in Telegram;
  • for the 7th grade - a conversation with subject teachers in “TamTam”;
  • for a group of classes 6–7 - a group in Viber;
  • there is a Moodle system - I post lessons there, and students send solutions;
  • some tasks are sent to me by mail;
  • and there are automatic testing systems Informatics and Codeforces - there I give contests for seniors and for guys from circles.

I would like to have fewer environments, but so far. If the child or parents have a principled position on some social networks, the teacher adjusts.

The third factor - when preparing lessons, now more time is spent on the synopsis: it needs to be written as thoroughly as possible.

Fourth - video tutorials. This is an excellent format, but to conduct them, you need much more training from the teacher and readiness - from the audience than for a regular lesson. I use Google meet, a Notebook from SMART Board and a graphics tablet plus draft images, assignments, and more.

So far, I managed to hold only circles, because there the audience is smaller than the class, and more conscious. Everyone liked it, we will continue. Next week I will be teaching in the tenth grade this way. I hope we will fix the discipline by this time.



Danil Nafikov, Almetyevsk, Republic of Tatarstan


Computer science teacher at boarding school No. 1. Developed a basic programming course in C ++. After training, students can create their own project on the Arduino platform. The program is not designed to prepare for Olympiad programming: teamwork is encouraged here, not competition.



It’s easy to transfer training to remote ’, but whether it will remain effective is a completely different question. Programming is a process, creativity. It is very difficult to learn from scratch yourself. (Not to be confused with the case when a person already knows how to program in one language and learns a second one.) Therefore, I like to work in small groups where you can approach and guide each student. But online, I lost this connection - maybe over time it will turn out to be tuned.

At the same time, to repack the course in an online format, a good Internet connection, a webcam, a microphone and a graphic tablet, which will replace the board, are enough. Now I am teaching a lesson like this: guys connect to Discord or jitsi.org, I broadcast my screen, write code, and we discuss algorithms. There is no tablet now, and I am suffering. I

came to this conclusion: if you need to give students some encyclopedic material, it is better to send them a link so that the guys can read at a convenient time for them. And on the air we will better discuss this topic and deal with more complex things. For example, the history of computer technology can be given for independent study (with reference to the correct channel), and the topic “Data Types” is best discussed live - there are many questions. So the school may well go partially online.



But with any training format, author’s courses will be developed. Each such program has its own goal and a specific audience of students. It is important what equipment is in the educational institution, for teachers and students; even the time of year and the features of the village may be of significance. The author takes into account all these nuances, selects from open sources all the material that suits him, modifies it, builds the course structure and fills in the “white spots” in it. If you are just inspired by someone’s success and start using someone else’s author’s course, you can never achieve a similar result. Need to adapt the program.

We discussed this and much more from the field of IT education at VK Fellowship schools. The specialists who conducted the master classes showed a really high level of knowledge and skills - and for me personally they identified the areas of personal and professional development. Special thanks to the VK team for the atmosphere of openness and sincerity that they created and supported - all the events were organized perfectly.



If you also teach programming or computer science in your own course, take part in VK Fellowship 2020 . Applications will be closed this Friday - fill out the form or tell the teacher you believe in about the program!

More articles:


All Articles