Background and History

Background

Situation in Estonia

• Soviet university and research system does not operate any more - Estonian education system is currently being reformed;

  The university reform in Estonia is in the middle. Students already can choose the courses to learn, but the courses are not systemised. There is no acceptable conception of curricula.

• lack of educated people (bad demographic situation, brain drain, brain wasting);

  There live about 1 million Estonians here and somebody has written, that maintaining a good university needs just about 1 million people as demographical basis. We have several universities and to give quality we should unite forces.
  The salary of a professor is about three times less than his students can get in companies. Several good professors of our speciality have left for permanent positions in Stockholm, Stanford etc and we cannot blame them as the income difference is not two or three, but about twenty times.

• lack of resources, equipment;

  Our firms, institutions, private persons do not have enough money and education is something that needs support.
  We have received support from the Finnish, who actually have donated Sun 3-s to us. Under the Tempus JEP we have and will buy new equipment to bring computer classrooms in Tallinn and Tartu up-to-date.

• no acceptable conception what and how to teach;

  We have no general curricula for IT & CS in different universities. Probably only few of us know that for example ACM produces an updated one every year to compare to.
  many of the courses are taught on the same level as fifteen years ago. The level of teaching CS disciplines has not developed, almost all courses need modifications.
  We must work on how to put together a curricula in IT & CS and then how to implement it. Our aim is to join the forces of academy of sciences and universities.

• the existing staff is scattered;

  The Academy of Sciences is opposed to the Universities. Roots to this come from the former soviet system, where all the basic research was concetrated to the Academy and universities just did the teaching.
  One aim of the project is to concentrate different communities to eliminate useless competition between Tallinn and Tartu and produce better courses.
  Contacts to the world´s scientific community are based on just individual contacts and therefore very occasional. One reason to this is that until recently Estonia was a peripheral part of the big Soviet Union and all contact were guided through Moscow.

CIDEC Project DATES