The Academy has created a unified communication environment for students using the VK social network: now first-year students will be able to quickly adapt to student life, receiving up-to-date information about academic and extracurricular activities. Today, all 10 institutes on the Moscow campus and branches implementing bachelor’s and specialty programs are connected to the project.
Through chats, students will learn about general meetings, changes in the schedule, and deadlines for submitting educational projects. Access to educational materials will also be provided here.
To interact with students, the Presidential Academy chose a popular platform - VK messenger. The work is being implemented within the framework of the pilot project “Online University Admission”, organized by Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Communications, VK. At the top level at the Academy, work is controlled by the Directorate for Information Policy and Public Relations with the support of the Higher Education block. Next, the responsible persons from each institute and branch are identified to conduct chats of structural units. Also, curators of chats for specific areas and groups are determined within institutes and branches.
"Getting to know fellow students and university life is the most important stage of being a student. Each of us went through this: making new acquaintances, memorizing the names of teachers, remembering the location of buildings. Conceptually, nothing has changed; current students are going through the same things. The only difference is that they always have a huge amount of digital data at their fingertips, packed into websites, telegram channels and blogs. For their convenience, together with colleagues from VK we made access to this information as simple and centralized as possible, so that students did not have to open dozens of tabs in the browser in search of the audience number. Now everything is available in one chat, and it’s very convenient",
The first universities that connected the additional function of VK Messenger also included: MSAL, RUDN, Bauman MSTU, St. Petersburg State University and Far Eastern Federal University. A total of 190 thousand freshmen joined official educational chats. The Presidential Academy attracted the largest number of students - more than 10 thousand.
Previously, VK Messenger and VK Education studied the expectations of first-year students from student life. The majority (86%) want to know in advance who they will study with. 56% would like to first communicate with future classmates in group chats, and 31% would prefer the format of personal correspondence. First-year students consider the group chat of the course in the messenger to be the most convenient channel of communication for communication on academic issues.
