Registration for the hub’s first courses is ongoing. Program mentors
expect 20-30 students to enroll. A graduation certificate will cost $49, but it
is optional.
Sergiy Miroshnychenko, who
completed a number of online courses, says
employers generally pay serious attention to these certificates.
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Project coordinator Daryna
Sysoyeva stresses that Bionic University encourages students of technical
departments to deepen their expertise. “Online learning is a very useful
and convenient method. It is a life-long process,” she adds.
The reason being, traditional
Ukrainian universities do not provide students with a skill-set required to
enter the workforce, says Learning Hub representative Maksym Lyashenko.
Besides Learning Hub, Coursera
offers several courses in Ukrainian on its main platform – www.coursera.org. Model
thinking is the most popular among them. It teaches to analyze economic,
sociological and biological data using mathematical models.
Another Ukrainian learning
platform is Online Universty, www.online.knu.ua,
a project of Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University.
Given the state of Ukraine’s
under-funded educational system, online learning could grow since they are
generally cheaper to organize than live lectures. Moreover, there are not
enough qualified professors to teach in Ukrainian universities, admits Antonina
Melnyk, coordinator of Vilna Shkola educational project. Another advantage is
that online courses can reach wide audiences with top notch professors giving lectures.
And since students don’t actually
meet their teachers in person, the risk of corrupt behavior is greatly reduced,
says Yuliya Horodyska, a Kyiv-Mohyla Academy political science graduate.
However, online learning has
its pros and cons. It is still popular mostly among students majoring in math, information
technology and economics. Meanwhile, many classes in natural sciences require
laboratory work with real items, comments Oleksiy Molchanovskyi, a research
fellow at Kyiv Polytechnical Institute and U.S.-based Georgia Institute of
Technology.
Nothing, of course, can beat traditional
learning when students often establish life-long friendships.
Kyiv Post freelancer
Volodymyr Zhyla can be reached at zhilav@gmail.com.
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