Expert: Mobile education as the main goal of education informatization

Mobile education is the main goal of the concept for introducing information technologies in the education industry. The opinion was voiced by Yuri Vorotnitsky, Director of the Information Technologies Center of the Belarusian State University, at the roundtable session held in BelTA’s press center on 8 April to discuss high technologies in education.

According to Yuri Vorotnitsky, modern people should have the ability to access education technologies. This is why Belarus is working to create a digital library system for its universities. The country’s top universities are becoming focal points, pilot platforms for innovation projects in the area of digital education. Expanding the range of education services for adults is an important avenue of higher education development. The Belarusian State University alone offers additional education for adults via seven institutes and structural units.

“Universities should develop education via the virtual environment. Some time ago the development of typical teaching materials to teach programming, advanced math, physics, pedagogics, psychology, philosophy, and a number of other disciplines was successfully attempted,” said Yuri Vorotnitsky.

Speaking about the development of cloud technologies in Belarus, the official remarked that the transition to cloud technologies can greatly reduce the central state budget’s spending on the modernization and maintenance of computer systems. A kind of a storage facility with different access rights and usage models will be offered. Using cloud technologies to offer access to educational resources to educational institutions and individual citizens is the key goal. “We believe that thanks to the introduction of various kinds of information technologies and reliance on mobile devices of students it will be possible to engage virtually everyone in the education process,” he remarked.

The roundtable session hosted by the BelTA website to discuss high technologies for education purposes took place as part of the first international educational forum in Belarus, which is taking place in Minsk on 8-10 April.