St Petersburg University and Yandex develop a model of the Cyber university together
St Petersburg University together with Yandex continue working on the creation and development of a model of the Cyber university. New areas of work will involve not only mathematics students, but also students of the programmes of ‘International Science and Methodology Centre’ (ISMC) at the University.
As part of its educational initiative, Yandex provided the teachers of St Petersburg University and the students of the programmes ‘Mathematics’, ‘Modern Programming’, ‘Mathematics, Algorithms and Data Analysis’ with cloud storage on ‘Yandex.Disc’. Also, students of the ISMC programme are welcome to use the systems ‘Yandex.Context’ and ‘Yandex.Connect’. The first will enable students to participate in competitions in programming and machine learning; whereas the second will give the opportunity to work as a team on the cloud service.
Yandex specialists were invited to carry out distance learning for the University programmes. For example, they managed to test the system of internship as a part of the Cyber university model. In the future, this experience is going to be used in the ISMC educational programmes, where internship projects are considered one of the key elements.
Apart from that, the University develops collaboration with the Computer Science Center, which is the educational project of Yandex and JetBrains in the sphere of computer science. For example, it was agreed that educational disciplines developed by the Computer Science Center on the Stepic.org platform will be implemented in the ISMC educational programmes.
In Spring 2021, St Petersburg University is planning to launch a special course by the leading developer of the Yandex.cloud Andrei Strelkovskii: ‘Introduction to Data Storage and Processing Systems’. The materials for the course are supposed to be included into the learning and teaching materials of ISMC.
Students can find more detailed information on internship and vacancies opened in the major partner companies of the University on the website page dedicated to learning activity. Future managers can go to the GSOM Career Center.
Today, there are more than 200 bachelor’s students at the programmes realised with the support of Yandex. Being the winners of Olympiads on their major subjects, they all succeeded in entering the University without competition. There were more winners of the Olympiad who entered without competition than vacancies at the programmes. The partners of St Petersburg university – Yandex, JetBrains and Gazprom Neft – resolved the problem by compensating for the cost of the education, so that the students could start studying.
The best students of these programmes receive merit scholarship of around 15,000 roubles per month from Yandex, JetBrains and Gazprom. Also, the companies give students the opportunity to do internships and understand how the expertise they gained at the University could be put into practice.