St Petersburg University opens the Centre for Teaching Excellence in Business Education
The Graduate School of Management at St Petersburg University has launched the Centre for Teaching Excellence in Business Education. It will introduce innovative teaching methodologies and unique digital tools into the educational process. It will also provide training and professional development courses for teachers. One of the important areas of work will be the dissemination of knowledge and experience in teaching business disciplines in a digital environment for universities in Russia and the CIS.
The establishment of a new specialised centre is an important step towards achieving the strategic goal of the Graduate School of Management to become the leading business school with a unique educational environment and an ever-advanced staff by 2025.
We see the mission of the centre in developing faculty as the main asset and resource of the school. Our ultimate KPI is to raise the academic performance of our students to international standards of a leading business school.
Olga Alkanova, author of the idea of the Centre for Teaching Excellence in Business Education
’The Graduate School of Management has always implemented cutting-edge teaching methods and technical innovations. The objective of the Centre for Teaching Excellence in Business Education is to consolidate the experience we have gained over the years. Ideally, we would like to have a clear action plan, a logical training, retraining and support programme for teachers. The field of education is constantly changing: there are new tools and a lot of discussion on the best solutions for teaching students, from serious research and Gartner analytics to the reports published by different organisations. One of our most important tasks is to understand and monitor what is happening in order to make decisions about implementing new approaches more deliberately’, said Olga Alkanova, Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing, Chairman of The Assurance of Learning Committee and author of the concept of the Centre for Teaching Excellence in Business Education.
Among the Centre’s plans for the near future is the provision of methodological training for teachers, taking into account the latest digital solutions for hybrid teaching, which are now being actively implemented at the Graduate School of Management. The Centre is also developing adaptation training programmes for new, visiting and novice teachers.
The activities of the centre also include supporting the Assurance of Learning Committee in accordance with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) standards and collecting and analysing feedback from students. The tradition of regular meetings for teachers to exchange ideas and best practices in the educational process, the Knowledge Café, will continue. There are also regular methodological seminars every two months. It is a new format of events to discuss the ideas, problems and needs of the teaching staff.