Minister of Education Sayasat Nurbek boasted about Kazakhstan’s featuring high in the Coursera ratings, which fact is supposed to demonstrate the high level of education in the country. People aware of what the Coursera ratings are, hastened to express condolences to the Minister. 

Mr. Nurbek wrote as follows – “Coursera published the Global Skills Report 2023. That report studies the demand in various courses, as well as success of their completion. Kazakhstan features 31^st there. The report says that Kazakhstan students are good at mastering technology skills, the Technology indicator is at 965”. The Minister took it as an achievement. Experts discouraged him.

When Victory is Acknowledgement of Defeat

Famous agriculture expert, Kirill Pavlov wrote that “with great airs, flowers and ribbon cutting (good there was no orchestra), our Minister boasted about high Coursera ratings”.

High rating is a good thing, but Coursera is an online-education platform, while the civilized world has numerous scientific studies, which studies show that growing online-education, especially that from higher education institutions, implies drop down of incomes an growth of poverty.

That is something similar to boasting about the level of the consumption of bread and sales of soap. It is OK, but that means, that the general level of life is dropping down.

Mr. Nurbek is a good guy, he keeps reporting positive news all the time. Sometimes he writes in Chinese.  Once, he published a post calling for investment into the research of Neutrino. On the other side, he is our Minister of Science and Higher Education, and he is the best indicator of the condition of our science and higher education.

Of course, we can confiscate smartphones from students and thus resolve a problem. But it appears, that the Minister was itching to boast, without the clear understanding of the pre-history, otherwise he would not emphasize that it was his Ministry that caused those ratings”.

Minister is not a Regular Person

Famous analyst Eldar Shamsutdinov joined that criticism:

“From the standpoint of a common man, that is some good news. From the standpoint of an economist or minister of higher education, that is bad news for the country. 

Economic science has this term – impaired benefit. Those are lowest category consumption products, the demand in which grows, when the population level of life falls down. 

Among such things are restored tyre casings, cabbages, second-hand clothes and cheap wine. Consumers buy less of those, when their incomes grow and buy more of them, when their incomes go down.

Coursera is a project for developing countries, trying to catch up with the developed world. 

Online education is an option for poor countries, those that cannot build up proper quality education systems. 

That is why, if our Minister says we are high in Coursera ratings… that, in virtue, means we got serious problems in education and the Ministry only facilitates same.

That does not mean we should abandon that, but boasting about that is a silly thing to do, especially for a Minister”.