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Ivan Prymachenko

  • Visiting Scholar, Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program, 2018-19

Biography

Ivan Prymachenko is an educational technology innovator and a co-founder of the largest Ukrainian massive open online courses platform Prometheus with 600,000 users. Structured as a non-profit organization, Prometheus creates and publish on its platform massive online courses from leading Ukrainian universities, companies, international organizations, and government. Prometheus also works on making its online courses a part of the curriculum of Ukrainian educational facilities in the blended learning format: twenty-two Ukrainian universities are already participating in this program. In addition, Prymachenko is a lead educational expert in the largest NGO coalition in Ukraine, the Reanimation Package of Reforms, the most influential non-governmental reform advocate in the country.    In 2011, Prymachenko saw the first massive open online courses launched by Stanford and was inspired to create similar courses in Ukraine. In 2013, while still pursuing a master’s degree, he launched the first massive open online course in post-soviet countries. In 2014, Prymachenko co-founded Prometheus and initially funded the project with six months' of his university scholarship. In four years, the volunteer initiative grew into one of the largest educational projects in independent Ukraine’s history. To date, the platform hosts 75 massive online courses from top-rated Ukrainian universities, international organizations such as United Nations Development Program, the Council of Europe, OSCE, and leading companies — Microsoft Ukraine and EY Ukraine. To support the implementation of key Ukrainian reforms, such as the public procurement system - Prozorro, Prometheus worked with the state authorities to create several governmental massive online courses and enrolled tens of thousands of civil servants as students.