Anastasia Andreeva

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems worldwide underwent an unprecedented transformation, propelled by the urgent need for digital solutions. A study by Diana Koroleva and Anastasia Andreeva explores this phenomenon through the concept of ‘Shock Innovation,’ shedding light on how crises can accelerate technological adoption in education.

COVID-19 has had a swift and ubiquitously profound social impact arguably unseen at any other point of crisis in recent history. As the pandemic marched on, Russian education experienced a hard time settling into the new lay of the land with COVID-induced disruptions defying much of the system’s common norms, standards, and practices.

Anastasia Andreeva, Diana Koroleva, Sergei Kosaretsky, and Isaak Frumin have embarked on a research journey to explore how various stakeholders in Russian K—11 education interacted amid a tapestry of centrifugal and centripetal winds stirred by COVID-19. A chapter summarizing the study findings has been published in Springer’s Schools and Society During the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Education Systems Changed and the Road Ahead.

The HSE University Institute of Education (IOE) will launch new courses as part of its master’s programmes in the 2022/23 academic year. They are designed to provide competencies to those either currently working or planning to work in education. The plans have already gained financial support: the Vladimir Potanin Foundation ran a grant competition in which two HSE University Institute of Education entries won grants and another made the reserve list.

Laboratory for Educational Innovation Research spoke at III Russo-Chinese Summer School “Overcoming Educational Challenges of COVID-19: Inequalities, Innovations, Technologies”. From 12th to 16th of July, the school brought together students of the Higher School of Economics and International Education College - Zhejiang University, one of the most prestigious pedagogical institutions in China.

1825 kilometers, different time zones and borders closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic did not stop the study of “Cultural patterns as a factor of successful digital transformation of Russian and Hungarian educational systems” (RFBR grant № 20-513-23002). The Laboratory for Educational Innovation Research (LEIR)  and researchers from the Hungarian Eötvös Loránd University have a zoom-meeting every 2 weeks to work on a research project. The teams conduct joint research and develop long-term partnership in expert and educational areas. At the end of 2020, Russian and Hungarian teams had an online meeting to exchange their best educational practices.

This February, the OECD Headquarters in Paris welcomed a premier cohort of educational experts from the EU, the USA, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Russia, etc. for a global forum to discuss findings from OECD’s large-scale project that analyzes how the landscapes of educational innovations have been evolving across 40 countries during the past 10 years.

Anastasia Andreeva, a student in HSE’s Comparative Social Research MA and research assistant at IOE’s Center for Educational Innovation, has recently set off for Paris, France to take up an academic internship with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). During her stay, Anastasia will focus on exploring various frameworks in measuring educational innovations.