He noted that without co-operation it is impossible to improve competitiveness in the international arena, to solve the problem of training personnel for high-tech mineral and raw materials complex and to increase the share of scientific and technical component in the educational process.
On Thursday, 30 April, a videoconference of the heads of higher educational institutions that are members of the Consortium of Mineral and Raw Materials Higher Education Institutions of Russia was held. Vladimir Litvinenko, Rector of St. Petersburg Mining University, who acted as the organiser of the online meeting, urged his colleagues to define common threshold requirements for students, postgraduates and teachers, which they would be obliged to meet. In particular, this would include the presence of scientific articles in reputable journals, additional competences and knowledge of a foreign language. Among other elements of collaboration, he named the creation of inter-university research groups and the organisation of collaborative laboratories.
"We have all the possibilities for closer integration. We have done a lot of joint work and created the International Competence Centre for Mining Education under the auspices of UNESCO by combining our efforts. We need to use its opportunities more actively, including the platforms of its foreign partners - Austrian, German and Finnish universities. The epidemic is not a reason to stop working, especially since the development of higher education, and thus the entire country, depends on its efficiency," Litvinenko said.
The consortium members agreed with this postulate. In particular, Alevtina Chernikova, Rector of MISIS, noted that "the introduction of innovations into production often becomes an impossible task for a single university". In her opinion, it would be possible to increase the attention of business to scientists' developments by obtaining joint patents and joining efforts to commercialise them.
Chernikova also drew attention to the need for interdisciplinary collaboration. After all, "the market today does not need "pure" IT specialists or experts in the field of automation of production processes. All modern engineers should possess these competences, and without the development of inter-university co-operation their full-fledged training becomes impossible".
The videoconference was attended not only by the heads of 14 universities whose profile is directly related to the training of personnel for the mining and oil and gas industry, but also by the rectors of a number of other technical universities, which to a greater or lesser extent solve this problem (there are about 170 of them in our country). Andrey Rudskoy, Rector of the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, was among them. He emphasised that "only cooperation will make it possible to train engineers for Russia's industry, whose economy will develop for many years to come on the basis of its rich raw material base".
At the end of the meeting, the Consortium members decided to expand the Consortium by involving other technical universities in the integration processes. Daria Vasilevskaya, a member of the Board of Directors of the International Centre of Competence in Mining Education under the auspices of UNESCO, was appointed Executive Director of the transformed organisation, who emphasised the need for interaction with relevant enterprises.
"If a student does not understand the business system, does not know the production processes, he or she is unlikely to be any good. That is why I welcome the efforts of the Mining University to unite Russian engineering universities around the International Competence Centre under the auspices of UNESCO. The task of this structure is to help develop integration processes and improve the competences of both students and teachers, as well as current employees of energy, mining and processing companies," Vasilevskaya said.
It should be noted that in addition to Russia's flagship technical universities, the delegates of the online meeting also included the heads of a number of exploration and production companies, QS rating agency, executive authorities and public organisations.