Higher School of Economics

On November 26, the HSE Faculty of Computer Science held the ‘IT Girls Night’ for the fifth time. This year the event was organized within the University of London’s campaign ‘Worldwide Conversation on Women’s Higher Education and Equality in the Workplace’. This campaign celebrates 150 years since the University of London opened up its ‘Special Examinations for Women’, the first university-level examinations offered for women in the UK. Ten years later, this step led to the University of London becoming the first institution of higher education in the UK to open up full degrees for women.

The annual reception for outstanding HSE alumni took place on December 7 at Saltykovy-Chertkovy House. The jury awarded alumni in six nominations.

At the end of November, HSE’s Moscow campus hosted the finals of HSE{Business}Cup 2018  – a completion for student business projects. In total, six teams received grants equal to 200,000 roubles from HSE to make their ideas a reality.

Benito Juarez, the founder of the first Fab Lab in South America and the Latin America Fab Lab Network, has come to HSE University for the 2018 autumn semester as an invited lecturer on Master’s Programme in Prototyping Future Cities. He is delivering a course in Impact Analysis for first-year students and leading the City Project module, a hands-on part of the Master’s programme. Mr Juarez has talked to HSE News Service about fab lab projects, creative cities of the future, and the courses he is teaching at HSE.

Large online courses will become even more in-demand since the quality and accessibility of education is rising. They will not, however, replace traditional in-person interactions between student and teacher. This was the conclusion of participants in the eSTARS 2018 international academic conference on the present and future of online education. HSE and the online learning platform Coursera teamed up to host the event in Moscow on December 5-6.

At the beginning of the new academic year, HSE launched a new mechanism to support student projects called HSEcoin.  The first phase of fundraising through this platform took place from September 13 to November 20. During this time, student projects managed to collect 5,069.14 HSEcoins, which equals more than one million roubles based on 2018 exchange rates.  Below is a summary of the first phase of the HSEcoin campaign.