The State Duma proposes to oblige online platforms to license additional professional education courses

The State Duma proposes to oblige online educational platforms to license additional professional education (AVE) courses. As conceived by the deputies, Rosobrnadzor and Rosakkreditatsiya will involve industry universities to check the content of curricula. Higher educational institutions often offer CPE programs themselves, so market participants doubt their objectivity and fear that the implementation of the idea will affect the cost and speed of launching courses.

The State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Communications and IT is developing a regulatory mechanism that will oblige online educational platforms to certify their courses, Alexander Khinshtein, the head of this committee, told Kommersant: “We are talking about additional checks of directly online programs that are taught as part of additional professional education “. Today, the legislation only provides for the licensing of online sites in the regional Ministry of Education and Science, then the programs are coordinated, but “nobody analyzes the educational content,” says Mr. Khinshtein.

The Committee proposes, through Rosobrnadzor and Rosakkreditatsiya, to involve industry universities to certify APE programs. “Now there are a large number of online courses on the Internet that clearly do not meet educational standards and raise serious doubts about the quality,” the deputy emphasized. He believes that an additional filter in the form of industry universities will make online courses of high quality. Rosobrnadzor did not answer “Kommersant”.

Additional vocational education can only be obtained on the basis of an already existing higher education. The educational organization developing the course must be certified. In addition, according to the order of the Ministry of Education and Science No. 499, after graduating from FVE, the participant receives a diploma of professional retraining or a certificate of advanced training.

For example, Skillfactory, together with the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, launched an FVE to train Data Science specialists with a diploma from two organizations. APE does not include language courses, except in cases where the student receives a diploma of retraining for an interpreter or a certificate of advanced training in this specialty. Skyeng confirms that the CVE market has recently “been flooded with a large number of courses that can hardly be called high-quality.”

From the point of view of restoring order, such a measure would be useful, says Rustam Ainetdinov, executive director of the company: “However, in its current form, the initiative will increase the cost of DPO, and will not remove low-quality products from the market.”

If the FPE initiative is adopted, it will be more difficult to adapt to current market demands, says Valentina Kurenkova, GR director of the Netology educational platform. As an example, she cites a course on training tools for working with neural networks: “Many educational platforms already have such courses and train specialists necessary for IT companies. But if the proposed changes come into force, it will not be possible to quickly launch programs.” Yandex Practice, Skillfactory, Skillbox and GeekBrains declined to comment.

Licensing measures for online CVE courses can “hit hard on the industry, which is still recovering after 2022,” says Kommersant’s interlocutor in the online education segment: “Online platforms really release a lot of courses – colleagues test hypotheses, bring them to the market partially finished and test products. No bureaucratic structure can withstand such a pace.” Consequently, the Kommersant source believes, the number of new courses will drop sharply.

In addition, many universities and technical schools themselves offer CPE programs, so online platforms compete with them, notes Alexander Fedorov, founder of the Fine Start school of engineering professions: “From this point of view, the initiative will not help the development of private educational institutions, because it is difficult to count on an objective assessment of your competitor’s product.

Yulia Yurasova, Nikita Korolev