On October 10, the Noosphere Engineering School together with “Oles Gonchar Dnipro National University” (DNU) organized a roundtable discussion on “Space Education: Past, Present, and Future“. The event was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the university and was one of the 2,600 events that took place as part of World Space Week all over the world.
More than 70 guests participated in the event including scientists, lecturers, business experts, leading educators, students of space specialties, and government representatives.
Noosphere brought together the key experts of Ukraine in the space industry at the event. Among them were:
– Sergey Okovitiy, Professor, Vice-rector for scientific work at DNU
– Alexey Kulik, Associate Professor, Director General at National Aerospace Educational Center of Youth named after A.M. Makarov
– Vitaliy Patoka, Deputy Director General for Personnel at Yuzhmash
– Yuriy Tkachev, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Space Information Technologies at DNU
– John Isella, Director of International Business Development, Firefly Space Systems Inc.
– Yuriy Golik, Advisor to the Head of Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration
Michael Ryabokon, Co-founder and Driver of Innovations at Noosphere, acted as moderator of the event.
The roundtable consisted of three discussion panels. The first one cover the following topics:
*The development vector of higher education in Ukraine
*Traditional and specialized universities: perspectives and challenges
*Space education as a point of intersection between business and science
*The trend of combining major subjects: justifications and pitfalls
Alexander Novikov, Deputy General Director at Yuzhnoye design office, shared the problems associated with searching and educating aerospace specialists
The second discussion panel included the topics:
*Specialties of the space direction: recruitment statistics, training problems, the needs of potential employers, and compliance with curriculums and the technical basis of the universities with them
*Production practice vs engineering laboratories within universities
Bogdan Bukayev, a student of the space specialty at the Department of Space Information Technologies DNU, spoke about his impressions and learning experience, advantages and disadvantages of modern space programs
The third panel was dedicated to the followings:
*Foreign experiences in training specialists in the space industry
*The mechanisms of developing the educational system in the context of decentralization
*University brands: the factors that influence their development
*The future of specialized space education
Golik Yuriy, Advisor to the Head of Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, said that space industry in Ukraine should be private and the monopoly of state structures should be abolished.
Students and participants of the roundtable identified the challenges that modern universities are facing. Challenges including the problem of finding and educating specialists in the aerospace industry, the lack of funding for the space specialties, the tendency of combining different specialties, and the lack of awareness about learning opportunities.
Thanks to a comprehensive view on the problems of space related education, other valuable insights were born at the roundtable. We hope that their implementation will make the national space educational system more modern and effective.