On August 21, 2020, a regular meeting of the seminar “Sustainable Development Goals. Tasks of NURE concerning their realization”. Under quarantine, the meeting was held remotely by teleconference.
The seminar discussed: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020 and the Voluntary National Review of the 2020 Sustainable Development Goals in Ukraine.
In the UN Report, Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez noted that the COVID-19 epidemic has a significant impact on the implementation of sustainable development goals in all spheres of life of the world community. Therefore, all organizations need to adapt their activities to new realities, using the latest technologies. The epidemic affects the availability and quality of education for all segments of the population, from schools to higher education institutions.
During the pandemic, there were urgent problems of access to education, in particular the lack of access in some segments of the population to quality Internet communication, or the lack of technology with which to obtain this connection.
There were also problems with the population’s lack of skills in working with information technology.
To overcome these problems, Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics as part of a consortium of universities participates in Erasmus + with the project “Digital Competence Framework for Ukrainian teachers and other citizens” («dComFra – Digital competence framework for Ukrainian teachers and other citizens»).
Project goals: to create and present an effective network of the Ukrainian National Digital Coalition, based on Ukrainian free economic zones, profile associations, state and business structures; develop and implement Ukrainian frameworks of digital competencies; develop recommendations for changing curricula / programs on digital competences, in accordance with the Digital Agenda for Europe (Digital Agenda for Europe) and modern labor market requirements; create digital competency trainings for teachers and other citizens; to conduct high-quality trainings of digital competencies for different segments of the population.
The Voluntary National Review of the Sustainable Development Goals in Ukraine 2020 outlines the objectives for achieving Goal 4 – Quality education, in particular, task 4.4 – improving the quality of higher education.
Under conditions of national quarantine, the educational process in NURE continued remotely. University teachers use a variety of platforms and tools for distance learning.
During the last semester in the service NURE DN (https://dl.nure.ua) actively worked: 7109 students, 636 teachers, 12 curators of categories and 4 administrators. In the spring semester, 1417 modules of disciplines were created and actively used to support the education of full-time and part-time students at 8 faculties.
Most services of Google Suite for Education (Meet, Drive, Classroom) are actively used.
The biggest challenge for the NURE Distance Learning service was to increase the number of active users during quarantine. The load on the server has increased 3 times. The physical server was transferred to a server in the cloud of one of the Kharkiv providers 2 years ago. This allowed you to very quickly scale the server performance and software environment settings. At the moment we have the following characteristics: 12 threads, 24 GB of RAM, 500 GB SSD (free space 117 GB), network drive (for backups) – 400 GB, DB Moodle – 32 GB, DataDir Moodle – 300 GB, the number of simultaneous possible connections to the server – 500. This is six times more than the characteristics of the server in early February 2020.
At the beginning of the semester, a attendance module (https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_attendance) was added to the LMS, which allows teachers to keep electronic attendance logs. This module proved to be popular and most teachers started using it.
2. One of the tasks to achieve the goals of sustainable development is to ensure equal opportunities for access of citizens of Ukraine to proper and quality education. For this purpose, educational centers “Donbass-Ukraine” and “Crimea-Ukraine” were created to meet the educational needs of residents of the temporarily occupied territories.
The report on the establishment of such centers in NURE and the progress of the admission campaign in 2020 was made by the Deputy Chairman of the Admissions Committee, Prof. Yerokhin A.L.
Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics invites graduates of Crimean schools and persons residing in the territory of the joint force operation (for the period of its holding) to study on the terms of state support of education. To serve entrants from the temporarily occupied territories on the basis of the university created educational centers “Crimea-Ukraine” and “Donbass-Ukraine”, which will operate from 05.08.2020 to 23.10.2020.
The progress of the introductory campaign was also announced. As of August 21, 2020, more than 10,000 applications were submitted to NURE.
