On 23 September 2015, a large Chinese delegation visited the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (UNESCO IITE) within its visit to Moscow under the invitation of the Moscow City Government University of Management. Above 30 visitors, including senior officials of education ministries and policy makers in higher education; academic staff; representatives of teacher associations and student organizations; the educational technology industry; researchers; as well as leading non-governmental organizations were members of the delegation.
The welcome speech at the opening ceremony and the presentation was delivered by Mr. Alexander Khoroshilov, UNESCO IITE Officer-in-Charge. He described UNESCO IITE mission, its recent activities with a focus on the Institute intervention into the development of ICT in education in different countries and presented recently published UNESCO IITE training and research materials. Mr. Khoroshilov introduced two recent international declarations: Incheon Declaration and Qingdao Declaration, which calls upon countries to ensure inclusive, equitable, quality education and training for all throughout life. The declaration will form the basis for the achievement of goals and objectives related to the Programme for the education for sustainable development, which will be ratified by the United Nations this year.
Ms. Svetlana Knyazeva, Chief of the Section of Digital Pedagogy and Learning Materials, introduced the UNESCO IITE project on foresight in ICT and Higher Education and the survey to be launched within the project, as well as the research already by UNESCO IITE in this area and invited allstakeholders to complete the survey within the project “Access, Equity and Quality: Envisioning the Sustainable Future of Postsecondary Education in a Digital Age”. The survey deals with the issues of validation and credentialing of learning results and open educational resources; curriculum and institutional change and teacher development.
During the meeting, the delegates exchanged good practices in ICT in education, discussed possible cooperation among UNESCO IITE and Chinese HEI, including the exchange of experiences.