Granteamus igitur – Newspaper Kommersant No. 220 (7421) dated 11/28/2022

Skillbox, which is part of VK and signed an agreement with a number of universities in the summer to create a unified educational platform, plans to spend more than 600 million rubles. to develop your platform. The company intends to expand the peak number of simultaneous users from 15,000 to 100,000 people, as well as add a programming simulator and the ability to integrate into university systems. The project expects to receive a grant from the government to replace foreign educational platforms, but experts say that there is no urgent need to develop the Russian system yet.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with the plans of the educational service Skillbox (part of VK) to create a new version of its learning management system (LMS). They are described in the passport of the “national educational platform” project, sent to the industrial competence center supervised by the Ministry of Education and Science (which unites representatives of different industries that need to replace foreign software) “Education”.

Plans to create a single platform with online courses were announced in June: then VK, Skillbox and a number of Russian universities (NRU HSE, MGIMO, UrFU, etc.) signed a corresponding memorandum. The project passport was signed by Moscow State Technical University. Bauman, who was not on the original list of participants in the memorandum. MSTU confirmed that they are interested in the project.

It follows from the document that Skillbox, in particular, intends to add to its platform a programming simulator with automatic code checking, text search by video, and the ability to set up a personal training schedule. Skillbox expects to finish development by April 30, 2024. Skillbox and VK declined to comment.

The development of a new version of the LMS, which in the document is called a replacement for solutions from Coursera, edX and Udacity that left Russia, is estimated at 605.8 million rubles, and the authors claim that the revenue from the project in the first year after release will exceed this amount. They requested a grant for 485.5 million rubles, the document states that the project was approved by the relevant working group. Kommersant sent a request to the Ministry of Education and Science.

The developers, as indicated in the document, plan to increase the simultaneous load on the platform (from 15,000 to 100,000 students at a time) and on the course marketplace (up to 50 million visitors per month). Skillbox also intends to develop software interfaces that would allow transferring data on a student’s progress to the IT systems of universities. Those, in turn, will have to be able to brand the platform and connect it with their own LMS.

Kommersant asked other owners of educational platforms about their development plans. Netology noted that they are improving the student support system, and recently implemented programming simulators. Moscow Digital School reported that they are focusing on gamification (the introduction of tools and approaches specific to video games) and tools for analyzing student progress. Representatives of the services expressed different opinions on the issue of automating work reviews: Maximum Educaiton said that they were focusing on this, and XYZ School said that they did not want to “completely replace live feedback with automation.”

It is necessary to develop Russian educational platforms, including analogues of the free software Moodle and Open edX, says Maxim Spiridonov, co-founder of the educational projects Netology, Foxford and Edmarket: there is no urgent need to replace them.” However, in his opinion, one should not expect new concepts in the field of learning management, since “most users of systems from this area are an academic environment with rather conservative views.” Mr. Spiridonov noted that Russia has already tried to create an “Open Education” platform with courses from different universities, but it “did not turn out to be widely in demand.”

The number of edtech companies working at the junction with the state education system is consistently decreasing, Skyeng Managing Partner Alexander Laryanovskiy noted: “But the VK project lies in the general logic of the development of events – schools and universities should use only solutions approved from above.” The expert believes that if current trends continue, a single platform will be able to achieve the indicators indicated in the project within three to four years. At the same time, he noted, when creating solutions for public institutions, “it is not always important how many people will use them.”

Yuri Litvinenko, Valeria Lebedeva