From 2K Applications to 29 Projects: ITMO and Alfa-Bank Hold AI Course for Educators

The course was designed under the guidance of ITMO Professor Alexander Boukhanovsky and lasted two months. Over this time, participants attended lectures, completed assignments, and consulted with experts from ITMO and Alfa-Bank. Particularly, they studied and learned to embrace AI technologies in the classroom, as well as to share their knowledge with students. All participants received certificates of advanced training upon the completion of the course.

This year, the organizers received over 2,000 applications – 500 more than last year – and among them selected 165 people from 35 cities and 65 universities in Russia, including Lomonosov Moscow State University, National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, St. Petersburg State University's Graduate School of Management, HSE University, Far Eastern Federal University, Sevastopol State University, and Novosibirsk State University. The course was held for the second time; overall, ITMO and Alfa-Bank have helped nearly 300 lecturers develop their AI skills. 

“It’s hard to imagine how AI can affect training and education in general, and our course with Alfa-Bank is one such attempt to find the answer. We received more applications than last year and they in turn greatly improved in quality: formulations and hypotheses became clearer and the level of project implementation increased, as well. It’s especially valuable to us that our course attracts motivated lecturers who wish to get into AI and apply these technologies in their practice,” highlights Vladimir Vasilyev, the Rector of ITMO University.

Participants of the course were trained within three tracks: 

• Introduction to AI (basic; for methodologists, managers of educational programs, and lecturers in humanities and natural sciences); 
• AI and Its Applications (intermediate; for lecturers in business informatics, mathematics, and programming and heads of IT educational programs);
• AI Training at Universities (advanced; for lecturers in machine learning, generative AI, and recommendation systems).

“Our course isn’t just another project for us; it’s an investment in the future and students who will soon be AI specialists at Alfa-Bank and other major IT companies. This isn’t only about knowledge but also human capital – it’s an excellent place for educators to network with their colleagues from all over the country,” notes Aleksey Belov, the head of employer brand development in the youth segment at Alfa-Bank. 

As a result of the course, the teams presented 29 projects that involved developing educational programs with AI and for AI specialists, as well as building AI data-based models and user-friendly apps and chatbots. Among the projects are a multiagent AI assistant for evaluating and generating educational presentations and a generator of classroom tasks in augmentation of computer vision data using LLMs.