HSE Online Wins Innovation Time Award for the Second Year in a Row

HSE Online has won the 'Breakthrough of the Year' category in the Innovation Time Awards. Since 2011, these awards have recognised the best projects and practices pushing forward innovation in various fields. As part of the business programme forum, HSE Online shared how to grow from producing online courses to a whole online campus in the metaverse in just 10 years.

HSE Online took part in the ‘Man as the Centre of the Universe’ session, where speakers shared successful cases that have become points of growth for business.

Elena Guseva, Head of the Support Unit for Online Projects, presented the evolution of digital education at HSE University using the example of the university's online campus. In 2013, the university launched its first online courses, three years later, individual MOOCs were combined into online specialisations, and in 2020, HSE University unveiled ‘Master of Data Science’, the first English-language online programme in the Russian Federation.

As a result, HSE University has become an independent provider of its online products, through the only online campus in Russia and the CIS countries. Today, more than 2,800 students study at the university's 21 online programmes, while the university's digital portfolio features 10 online specialisations and 350 mass online courses.

HSE Online meets the need for lifelong learning anywhere and anytime. Seminars, business labs and workshops keep students from getting lost online, and video lectures allow them to study in their free time. The online campus helps form a fully-fledged community of students.

Elena Guseva spoke about the challenges that HSE Online faces.

Elena Guseva

‘In the fast-growing online education market, competition intensifies not every year, but every month. We are constantly developing in order to keep our leading position: we were the first to launch an English-speaking online master's degree on the market, the first to open an online campus, recruit the largest number of online students, etc. These breakthroughs allow HSE University to remain at the cutting edge in the online learning market.’

Elena Guseva says that the success of the fifth campus of HSE University breaks stereotypes about online education, and proves that digital higher education can be full-time and of high quality to the academic community and applicants. ‘We explain that after studying online undergraduate and graduate programmes, students receive the same degree as those who study on campus and attend lectures in the classroom. Moreover, the online campus blurs boundaries and allows you to communicate in real time with leading experts and industry leaders while staying at home. Such interaction is impossible offline,’ she adds.

Since the launch of the first online programme in 2020, the number of HSE online students has increased sevenfold times and currently stands at 2,835 people, while in 2023, twice as many students enrolled on the online master's programmes as in 2022 (720 vs. 1,518). One in every five students enrolled on a fee-paying place at HSE University in 2023 was a student of online programmes.