OREANDA-NEWS. August 20, 2007. IBS and Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics embark on a project to develop the Online Training Corporation, an educational information system to be implemented as part of the Academy’s innovative curriculum, reported the press-centre of IBS.

A number of ambitious tasks is to be addressed in the course of the project including a major challenge of providing an effective support to and development of the Academy’s training process through the implementation of the state-of-the-art information and educational technology.

The Innovative curriculum of the Russian Academy of Economics (RAE) was one of the forty prizewinning universities’ curricula in 2007. One of its key components is the development of the Online Training Corporation, an educational information system that will allow to establish an integrated environment to perform research and development, research and production and training activities.

To set up an educational infrastructure to introduce applied forms of education leveraging the use of new information technology.

To improve quality, accessibility and interactivity of today’s forms of education, and to enhance training process manageability.

IBS was awarded the contract based on a public bid, in competition with OOO NPK Information Technologies. The budget for the project (to be financed from the funds of the Education national priority project as part of the Academy’s innovative curriculum) will total 86,9M rubles.

Bearing in mind the variety of RAE training processes to be automated, the functional design of the Online Training Corporation offered by IBS will include several interrelated components, namely three functional systems (remote control over the training process, virtual lab, project and knowledge management system), a situational training center  and seven dedicated labs:

Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Lab
Business Intelligence Lab (BI)
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Lab
Customer Relations Management (CRM) Lab
eBusiness (EB) Lab
Project Management (PM) Lab
Business Processes Engineering (CASE) Lab

Demonstration models of the most popular information systems for business application will be rolled out for training purposes at the labs.

Software application virtualization technology will make it possible to simulate multiple user PC operation within a single server. This will help to greatly simplify software application management in the course of training and to reduce project costs and operating expenses.

The project will be implemented in two phases. The first phase includes survey, concept development and direct design and deployment of the information system based on IBS’s computing facilities. This phase is scheduled for completion by the end of the year. The second phase comprises system migration to and commissioning on RAE’s computing facilities and training for RAE’s users and technical experts, to be completed by the end of November 2008. 

The second phase will require to hold a separate bid for related equipment procurement.

Cooperation with Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics is not the only large-scale IBS project in education. The company is closely involved in implementing the innovation projects for the State University – Higher School of Economics, Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radio Electronics (TUSUR), Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy and other leading Russian universities. A wide experience in IT projects implementation and consulting drove the development of a complex package proposal for universities at IBS.