Olympics experience transformed into online programs

The challenge

• Integrating hybrid teaching methods for sports management education, balancing in-person and online learning effectively
• Ensuring cross-cultural accessibility and accommodating diverse linguistic preferences among students from various backgrounds
• Maintaining interactive learning experiences in remote environments, crucial for engaging sports students accustomed to hands-on coaching

"RIOU stands for Russian International Olympic University. It seems to be a strange mix - Russian and International. This is a unique combination because our educational institution itself is unique. Our university plays a key role in the anti-doping promotion; we cover a wide variety of categories of sports managers, coaches, and athletes" said Professor Lev Belousov, Rector.

"We don’t do only lectures or just seminars. We use all kinds of business games, cascade training, team building and a number of other tools. For these modern methods of education, we use a number of technical innovations."

The solution

The pandemic has pushed us towards a hybrid form of teaching. However, I must tell you, we have thought about this before. Since 2016 we have been looking for a platform that would allow us to solve all educational problems. We have chosen CYPHER, and I must tell you that it was the best decision. First of all, it allows us to solve all didactic tasks simultaneously.

Features

• Communication: Adult sports students are accustomed to being in constant contact with their coach and with their mentor - with the person who constantly conducts their activities and training process. In this sense, when they come to university, they are very attentive and perceptive to what the teacher tells them. CYPHER's LMS helps the teacher a lot in this regard, in terms of communication with the student - both as a tool with instant messages, and a feedback form where the teacher can comment and give feedback on student-submitted work, for example - Sergey Serdyukov, Head of Distance Educational Programs Department.
• Automation: CYPHER provides an opportunity to set the timeframes, the deadlines, the number of given attempts. This frees up some of the teacher’s time when organizing the final certification and also puts all students on the same level - Sergey Serdyukov, Head of Distance Educational Programs Department.
• Ease of use: We do not have special support for users who study with CYPHER. They intuitively dive into the platform and usually have no questions. Teachers also like this system. They find it convenient; there are no complex interfaces or dependencies that need to be tracked to create a course - Alexander Smirnov, Head of IT.

The results

• Utilizing specialized features in CYPHER to optimize the integration of hybrid teaching methods in sports education
• Expanding multilingual support within the LMS interface to accommodate diverse linguistic backgrounds of students
• Leveraging communication tools like instant messaging in CYPHER to foster continuous interaction between students and instructors, simulating the dynamics of in-person coaching remotely

"First of all, CYPHER allows assessing students’ knowledge quickly based on the unit results - for example, final testing. We can also measure the depth of students' learning over time in terms of creative tasks, such as essays or presentations that students upload to the system, which we can check" said Sergey Serdyukov, Head of Distance Educational Programs Department.

Veranika Hres, a MSA Program Student said "You can easily find the necessary task that needs to be completed, instructions on how to do it; you can conveniently send an already prepared task, find the required learning materials, find out the deadlines, get to know the teachers, and contact them."