The concept of the university of the future was presented in detail at a meeting with the Belarusian president to discuss the project to set up Academy of Intellectual Technologies, BelTA has learned.
Education Minister Andrei Ivanets reported that the implementation of the Academy's experimental programs will be fully feasible only through the selection of motivated and gifted individuals. According to experts, these experimental programs would not produce the desired effect under a mass enrollment model.
“We need to open the doors to college graduates and to university students who have already proved their worth and want to transfer to this new educational center. That trajectory is also laid out in the draft presidential decree,” the minister stressed. He went on to explain that candidates would need to sit an interview and pass an internal exam.
“Olympiad winners, both the international and national ones, should be recruited straight from school,” Andrei Ivanets noted. “We can’t afford any time lag where they might waver between choosing a Belarusian university and heading abroad.”
The education minister noted that the academy will place a strong emphasis on delivering tangible results for the economy. Training will focus on the natural sciences and engineering technologies. Specialists will be educated in the development of cutting-edge, advanced technologies that can be marketed both in Belarus and abroad.
“The focus will be on project-based learning. We will provide the basic education over the first two years and it will be intensive and demanding. Starting from the third year, students will essentially transition to individualized learning: a specific project, a specific technological challenge, and an enterprise for which the specialist or an interdisciplinary team will be tasked with finding solutions,” Andrei Ivanets emphasized.
One of the key priorities of the new educational center, he noted, is addressing the staffing issue: “We must ensure the continuity of generations. In a number of fields, we are seeing an aging workforce. This is evident both in our universities and at the Academy of Sciences. We need to reverse this trend and cultivate a new generation of researchers, lecturers, and chief technologists."
When working on the new educational center concept, the experience of leading universities in Russia and China was studied. “We explored promising fields, examined how the educational process is structured, and saw how students, the faculty, graduates, and the real economy are brought into the fold,” Andrei Ivanets said. Consideration was also given to the country’s own classical education model, which combines foundational courses in core disciplines with hands-on laboratory work. With this in mind, the minister underscored that the Academy of Intellectual Technologies is envisioned as a hub comprising not only classical higher education schools but also research and educational laboratories.
