Satbayev University brings the online education in the country to a new level

The last two years have become difficult for the education system of the Republic of Kazakhstan. For many schools and universities, online learning has become a challenge; teachers and parents have noted many problems and shortcomings associated with the new system. However, if you take full advantage of modern opportunities, it is easier to get strong knowledge online - according to Professor Sergey Vitaliyevich Khrushchev, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, who teaches at Management and Mathematical Economics Department at Satbayev University Project Management Institute. In this interview, Sergey Khrushchev talked about how he uses Microsoft services in his daily work, achieving effective online education for students.

Tell us a little about the history: How was online education born?

Wikipedia says that the first attempt at distance education dates back to 1728, when the idea of learning by mail arose. Since then, distance education has developed in parallel with communication technology development. The idea of online education arose when the possibility of online computer connections appeared. In 1989, in St. Petersburg, at the institute where I worked, I could connect via video communication with Moscow. A few years later, Russian Academy of Sciences already had an academic network that allowed lectures to be delivered online.

In parallel with technology growth, the work was underway to adapt educational methods to new technologies. A significant step forward has been made due to ubiquity of the Internet. From handwritten lecture notes and printed teaching materials of teachers, the teaching staff switched to materials that were hosted on university servers in the form of files. There were even so-called electronic whiteboards that automatically recorded in files what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. I must say that all this activity was somewhat spontaneous and unsystematic, but it was the mentioned activity that played a crucial role in creating fundamentally new teaching methods due to computers.

And what is happening in the field of online education now? Have new prospects and opportunities appeared?

Yes, along with the creation of cloud data storage and cloud computing, such as Microsoft OneDrive, fundamentally new opportunities for online education have appeared. It is important to understand here that they opened only when there were quite a lot of such centers and it became possible to place the software necessary for training in them. Nevertheless, few people know the capabilities of these programs, so they do not use them. When distance learning was born, a teacher in it wrote tasks to students by hand, mail delivered these tasks to students, and students performed these tasks and sent them back. The teacher received them, checked, corrected mistakes, put an assessment in the register and in the work and returned the work to the students by mail. This scheme was found in 1728, and has remained until now. Its distinctive feature is that the teacher does not need to know anything except his subject and his teaching methods. I wrote the student's address, pasted a stamp and took it to the post office. That is why, when in the spring of 2020, due to the pandemic, it was necessary to switch to distance learning, all over the world immediately massively returned to this scheme. Only instead of mail, WhatsApp, Zoom and e-mail began to be used. In addition, many people are still sure that this was distance education.

Is it not so?

No, not really. The main difference between the conventional and modern model is exactly how the processes occur. Previously, the teacher manually wrote the assignment and sent it by mail, and then the student performed it and sent it back. In other words, everything was done CONSISTENTLY. Such a chain of actions was one action after another, then a third, then a fourth. Moreover, modern technologies allow the teacher to do everything at the same time. For example, when presenting educational materials, distribute them to all students simultaneously in a hundred languages. In full-time education, this is impossible in principle. At the same time, PowerPoint slides that the teacher prepares for the lecture can be automatically translated into any of the 19 main languages, including Russian, at students’ request. It remains only to develop a program for simultaneous translation and the problem of simultaneous teaching for the whole world will be solved. Moreover, this is just one example! So online technology is a fundamental breakthrough in teaching.

So in your opinion, does online education have good prospects?

I believe that online education is guaranteed to replace full-time education, since these technologies are superior in all respects to traditional full-time education, cheaper, actually much more efficient, and easier.

As a transitional solution, many now use the so-called hybrid learning. In short, its essence is that students' computers are transferred to the university, and the learning process is conducted half online. A computer and Microsoft Office perform the role of pen and paper on it. Instant communication via the cloud is used instead of mail and whiteboard.

Hybrid learning facilitates the tasks of controlling students, but affects the cost of training. In fact, it has many technical limitations, the main one of which is the need for a fast Internet for the entire university.

That is why education around the world has faced enormous problems due to pandemic. Teachers had no desire to study the new system. Everyone hoped that the epidemic would pass and it would be possible to teach as before. The exception was the so-called K-12 schools, in which Microsoft introduced its new technology. For these schools, the transition to an online format and back to a hybrid one did not pose any problems and did not affect the educational process at all.

However, most teachers believe that online learning is less effective. Tell us by example, how the effectiveness of learning increases when using online education tools?

Let us just go through my personal example on several components of teaching in full-time and online mode. Let us start with the lectures. I come to a large auditorium and I have about 60-75 students in it. It is necessary to write on the board with chalk, there is not enough space on the board, the chalk crumbles and ends quickly. For each lecture, you need to prepare materials, bring them on a flash drive and upload them to the computer in the classroom. The image is usually poorly visible, but the projector is hanging from the ceiling and I cannot focus it without a ladder. All this is inconvenient as well as inefficient.

There is also such a thing as attendance. In order to check it, I have to print out a statement before the lecture. I do not have time to collect student signatures by myself. If you put it in the rows, it turns out that everyone is in the classroom, although a simple visual calculation shows that this is far from the case. Controlling how attentively students listen to me during a lecture is a difficult and thankless task. In addition, if a student misses a lecture for a good reason, then he has nowhere to watch it.

Now we look at how things are online. There is no need to go anywhere. 10 minutes before the lecture, the system sends a reminder about the lecture to all students in Microsoft Kaizala messenger. Students receive an electronic Attendance 2021 card specially made by me. They click on it and it activates, inviting students to take a selfie to mark their presence at the lecture. At the end of the lesson, students click on it again. Then Microsoft automata process this information without my participation and send it to a list of students specially created before the start of the semester. It has all the student data and all the attendance data that can be viewed at any time. The list can be sorted, filtered, and many more different actions.

Moreover, all this is fair related to other aspects of the lecture. I have an infinite number of electronic whiteboards of infinite size each, which save for students everything I wrote on them. All students see my slides and boards at close range and everything is clearly audible. Materials are recorded in the cloud and immediately available to everyone. You do not need flash drives, printouts, or a projector. All slides can be automatically translated into 19 world languages at students’ request.

A lecture is held in Microsoft Teams, there is a chat for questions and a raised hand option, so students can always ask a question during the lecture. There is no psychological pressure of a large audience on the student. Classes for them look like individual lessons with a tutor. At the same time, you can give a lecture to a group in which there can be up to 999 students! This is not possible in full-time mode in principle.

Unlike night mode, I can check the actual attendance. To do this, I can create a form in Excel Online at any time, in which there is only one question about whether a student is here or not. When I give a lecture, I ask everyone at random intervals to open this form and check in. A minute is set for this. All data is automatically recorded in the attendance table. You can immediately see who is present and who is not. As a result, attendance has increased, and significantly.

Students' attentiveness can be checked as well. To do this, at a pre-appointed time by me, the machines distribute test questions to students for understanding the material. There are five questions, and the one who answered at least three correctly gets a score. For a semester, you can score 10 points, which go to the final certification. As a result, academic performance in my groups has improved.

Finally, the system automatically records the lecture on video and the recording file is saved for students in the cloud, and they can review it at any time. Since I have one terabyte of free space on OneDrive, it will be enough for five years of teaching.

If a student cannot attend a lecture, then he fills out a request form for absence. The request automatically comes to me, and I either approve it or not. If I approve, then the machine writes this request to my to-do list. After 24 hours, I will check through a special Insights program whether this student watched the recording of my lecture or not. This is also impossible in full-time education.

Let us move on to homework. In the night mode, I used to post them on the portal; students printed them out, wrote solutions by hand and handed them over to me for verification. Now everything is different. Vending machines distribute homework to students at the time I specified, indicating the deadline in the cloud. The assignments are in Azure cloud, and students log in to them and do the work online. If someone submitted the work ahead of schedule, and then found their mistake, he can withdraw the work, correct it and get a higher score. Checking the work, I write comments at work in the same way as in full-time mode, I rate and write a review. After that, I put an assessment in the journal and send the work back to the student for working on the mistakes. At the same time, the work remains in the system and it is easy to get statistics for each task. With the help of Power BI Pro, you can determine the statistical dependencies of some tasks on others and adjust teaching.

There is another extremely important advantage of Microsoft 365 Education A3/A5 online system design. In full-time education, there has been a question of freeing teachers from excessive reporting and unnecessary paperwork for many years. All ministries of education periodically return to this problem, but there is no success anywhere yet. Microsoft system automatically maintains all documentation and writes everything that happens in it to the cloud. Therefore, absolutely all the reporting standards currently adopted in full-time education, in Microsoft online system, do not make any sense at all.

You do everything in Microsoft Education. Why do you use exactly the given system to teach your students?

Now, this is the most powerful and individually customizable system. None of Microsoft's competitors, even Google with its Google Glass system, has such integration, completeness and, most importantly, extensibility in their systems. It is a very significant advantage.

Back in 2016, Microsoft prepared everything necessary for online training. The company has created its own network of large data centers in many parts of the world, combined into a single Azure cloud and has the best system for working with Office 365 documents. All this together is called Microsoft 365 Education A3/A5.

I would mention one more important thing. Microsoft buys the most promising companies in IT market. Therefore, in 2005, the company completely bought out Novell only for the sake of Novell NetWare network software solution created by it, in order to create its own protocol for simultaneous access of users to the cloud on its basis. Now Microsoft is actually completing a deal to acquire Nuance, which is a leader in the field of artificial intelligence.

I want to give a not so large-scale example of one project from the history of mathematics. Until the end of the 70s of the last century, mathematicians wrote all their formulas by hand, as hundreds of years before. To print them in a typographic way, it was necessary to type them on a special machine in the publishing house. Then Donald Knuth created a formula set program known as TeX. In the 70s and 80s of the last century, there was also a lot of talk that it was very difficult, that it would never take root, etc. As a result, LaTeX appeared — it is a program that allows you to type formulas and draw graphs, and even drawings due to different blocks of this program. Now mathematicians can type complex formulas themselves and submit articles in ready-made form to publishers.

In Microsoft 365 Education, everything is done exactly according to the same scheme. The only difference is that the teacher does not create an image of the formula, but their personal digital workplace. The teacher takes individual parts of Microsoft 365 Education and collects the machines he/she needs from them as from Lego cubes, and then uses them in training. A little preparation is needed, and then everything is done automatically. That is why I see great prospects for this system. It provides the best tools for knowledge transfer. In addition, as for personal communication, in this system it can be created as much as the teachers themselves wish.

And how to organize a knowledge check remotely and at the same time be sure of the transparency of the answers and evaluation? After all, no one can see what is happening on the other side of the screen.

This is a very good question, as distance education enthusiasts do not normally discuss it. Microsoft 365 Education A3/A5 system allows you to solve the given problem, since absolutely everything that happens around the computer is registered online and recorded in the cloud. To work with Microsoft 365 Education A3/A5 system, each student must have at his disposal a laptop or a personal computer with a camera and a mobile phone. The student confirms the identity and begins to complete the tasks. The proctor can see at any time what a student is typing.

At the same time, unlike full-time exams, the student does not see the proctor. Everything that happens on its screen is recorded by the system using the free ShareX application. The use of a second monitor is excluded in this case, since the mouse pointer should be visible in the recording all the time. My students also install Kaizala messenger on this phone, which, if desired by the teacher, can send messages about the student's movement every 5 minutes. Proctors also send their records to the cloud. There are still a number of measures at the level of Microsoft system administrators; I call them a set of measures of excessive control. All these records remain in the system and can be checked. If there is doubt that the student wrote the work on their own, you can invite them to the office hours online and ask them to report their decision there on the record and answer questions. After that, there is no doubt, whether there has been a violation of the principle of academic integrity.

It seems that there are many of these tools. Can you recommend the three most important tools that can be enough for a modern teacher for the first time?

I think we should start by giving lectures in Microsoft Teams, while mastering the interface of this program. The second important program for understanding the system is Microsoft Notebook. The third tool is Insights Student Assignment and control program. The teacher should understand that he/she is dealing with a constructor like Lego children's constructor, from which, by properly connecting small blocks, anything can be folded. It is also necessary to realize that the task of transferring well-known methods of teaching a variety of subjects to the Microsoft system is very relevant. This is an open field for those who develop new methods in pedagogical sciences.

Is there a center in Kazakhstan that can help teachers master these tools?

I do not know such a center now, in not only Kazakhstan, but also nowhere else. However, Microsoft has an educational sector, and the company has included Learning Path learning module in Microsoft 365 Education. That is, if desired, it is quite easy to find information about the system.

Some opportunities for personal use are quite expensive, but it is not only affordable throughout the university, but also allows you to achieve savings of up to 40% on the maintenance of the university. However, it is not even the savings that are important here, but the fact that this system provides a technically better level of education than the traditional one. Teachers just need to learn how to play the highly intelligent Microsoft 365 Education game.

Do you have any plans related to online learning, and what are they?

Answer: Of course, there are plans. I am currently writing a book in English and Russian on teaching mathematics in Microsoft 365 Education A3/A5. The book in English is available on my website .

The progress demonstrated by Microsoft over the past two years is so rapid that it is impossible to publish this book in a traditional format. Therefore, it is distributed free of charge in the form of versions. Version 3.0 is now available, five chapters of which describe in detail the techniques I have described.

In addition, the next question is which of the services available in Microsoft can be used in the education system and how to integrate Power BI Pro program, which is now popular in business, into it. Thanks to it, university leaders can monitor the educational process online via a mobile phone. Of course, in order to make it work, all the work of the university must be transferred online. Well, at the initial stage, it is necessary to make some efforts. The sixth chapter of my book will be devoted to it.

Therefore, we have big plans to bring online education in Kazakhstan to a new level. We will be happy to help with this. You can start by reading a book and first experiences in Microsoft Education. I believe that anyone can master this system, and I wish all teachers good luck!

Get “Teaching Mathematics with Microsoft 365 Education A3/A5” book