TOMSK, Dec 2 – RIA Tomsk. Employees of Tomsk State University (TSU) create a digital tutor – an application designed to help students navigate the educational and extracurricular programs of the university; its "semi-manual" version is planned to be launched by the end of the academic year, Head of TSU Tutor Service Vadim Pak told reporters on Wednesday.
Earlier it was reported that in 2016 TSU opened a tutor center, specialists for which were trained from students, masters, graduate students and university teachers. Tutors help students to choose a place of practice, topics of term papers and diploma theses, specialization, which they should define in the third or fourth years.
Vadim Pak said that during the existence of the center, its employees found out that it is difficult for students to navigate in the rich environment of the university, which is why some projects and events designed to "pump up the skills" of students go unnoticed. TSU tutors want to digitize the educational and extracurricular environment of the university in their application.
"We could not help but think of the idea of creating a digital tutor that would help students navigate the university environment and, based on data, build a digital profile of student interests. We will strive to make it an app for a smartphone. By the end of the academic year, we plan to launch the first version in semi-manual mode in the existing electronic university environment MOODLE", – said Pak at a press conference at the RIA Tomsk media center.According to him, it is planned to take data for a digital tutor from the electronic educational platform of the university, while focusing on student profiles. Also, specialists will identify digital traces of students in social networks, monitor their activity when participating in university events.
"We already know how to understand the interests of students from different data, among other things, we have data on the diagnosis of personality types – more than four thousand students have passed this diagnosis. In addition, TSU has one of the strongest teams in Russia to work with big data in education", – he said.
According to him, in the future this system can be connected with other universities or offer them a ready-made project.