A free listener is a student who has the opportunity to freely attend university studies without being officially enrolled and without the right to receive a diploma. In the West, for the lectures and courses you listen to, they issue certificates, but in Russian universities you will most likely receive nothing but knowledge itself.
Our institute of volunteers was popular in pre-revolutionary times, but now it has fallen into decay. Most Russian universities reasonably refer to the fact that the very concept of “free listener” simply does not exist in the country's modern educational legislation.
1. Moscow State University
At Moscow State University, as it should be in classical universities, there is a practice of free attending classes, so theoretically there is an opportunity to become a volunteer, but in practice, free access to knowledge is difficult due to administrative difficulties: in order to enter Moscow State University, you must have a pass or student card university, otherwise the guards will not let you through.
Advice: you need to decide which lectures you want to attend (at which faculty, which department, at what time) and send your request to the mail of the chosen faculty. The success of the venture depends both on the favor of the head of the department and on the loyalty of the corps guards. If the department answers you with consent, ask its employees to draw up a letter for the guard with the following content: "Department of such and such asks to let (full name + passport details) on such and such days, at such and such time, to such and such audience." Always have your passport with you and try to get the phones of the department's laboratory technicians so that in case of difficulties they can meet you at the entrance.
2. Higher School of Economics
The HSE has special disciplines available to everyone - university-wide electives. You need to have time to sign up for them, then you will have the opportunity to attend courses on leadership strategy, and on historical conflict resolution, and on the basics of web design. There is a special option for applicants - students of preparatory courses at HSE can attend some of the first-year lectures. And for those who then enter the university, these lectures will be credited in advance. But attending any classes of a particular faculty is not observed in mass practice.
Advice: if you have a specific request, and you clearly know which lectures you would like to attend, you can try to negotiate the conditions of attending classes with the faculty administration.
3. RSUH
At the Russian State University for the Humanities, free listeners are welcome, so anyone can attend lectures free of charge. True, the problem of admission will have to be solved by yourself - no one will be puzzled by this especially for you.
Advice: the university administration advises to get a pass either through friends or by contacting the admissions office.
4. VGIK
There is a fairly strict access system (students have special cards for passing through the turnstile), but for those who really want to get inside, in order to be in the company of potential cameramen, directors, screenwriters and actors at least for a while, there is a way out. Most of the classes are held in small groups, and you will not get to them, but you are welcome to film screenings for the entire university.
Advice: in the fall, when the pass cards have not yet been made to all new arrivals, it is quite possible to go inside with a group of other students, showing the security guard from afar what resembles a student ID card.
Free birds on bird rights
Audiences are different. Sometimes they are almost students. They attend not only lectures, but also practical classes. They can even take exams. And skip! Moreover, they have no right to be expelled from the university. Because only students are excluded - if they are guilty, of course.
There are other volunteers - they want to sneak into a lecture at the university of their dreams, but they do not even expect to be, say, enrolled in a student library. Of course, no one has the right to exclude them from the university either. But just not to let there - please.
Many people, in whose life the experience of studying as an auditor was present, managed to show themselves as real professionals. Ethnographer, anthropologist and traveler in the southeastern space of the Earth Nikolai Miklukho-Maclay, as well as physiologists Kliment Timiryazev and Alexei Ukhtomsky, were volunteers at St. Petersburg University; physiologist Ivan Sechenov visited the medical faculty of Moscow University in the same way. The inventor of radio, Guglielmo Marconi, was a volunteer at the University of Bologna.
There are many artists among the well-known auditors. The Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg became especially popular among them. It was visited by the romantic painter Vasily Tropinin, landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi, author of historical paintings Henrikh Semiradsky, creator of bright and colorful images Philip Malyavin, members of the World of Art association Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst. The same academy accepted the sculptors Pyotr Klodt (horses on the Anichkov Bridge in St. Petersburg - his work) and Mark Antokolsky, whose fine sculptures Muscovites and guests of the capital can see in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts as volunteers. By the way, it was possible to study art as a volunteer in Moscow as well - the craftswoman of carving silhouettes Elizaveta Sergeevna Kruglikova studied with such rights at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.
The knights of the word did not lag behind in their free education - poets Fyodor Tyutchev (verbal department of Moscow University), Nikolai Nekrasov (philological faculty of St. Petersburg University), classic of Romanian literature Mihai Eminescu (a number of humanitarian courses at Vienna University), Sasha Cherny (Heidelberg University), Serge Yesenin (Historical and Philosophical Department of the Moscow City People's University named after A. L. Shanyavsky); prose writers Nikolai Leskov (Kiev University), author of "Sketches of the Bursa" Nikolai Pomyalovsky (St. Petersburg University), Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Department of Architecture of the School of Fine Arts in Paris); the first Pushkin scholar Pavel Annenkov (St. Petersburg University).
The usual way to art is "from the opposite" - for example, if mathematics is not given, willy-nilly you will begin to study something else. But the composer Miliy Balakirev was not like that - he was not afraid of the fate of a volunteer at the Faculty of Mathematics of Kazan University.
In the twentieth century, it was mainly actors who managed to become volunteers - Vladimir Etush and Veniamin Smekhov (Theater School named after Boris Shchukin), Andrey Rostotsky (VGIK), "Fandorin" Ilya Noskov (LGITMiK named after N. K. Cherkasov).
Well, how not to remember the computer revolutionary Steve Jobs - one of the main inspirers of the modern generation! He nevertheless recovered at Reed College in Portland, America - and also as a volunteer.
History with geography
Normal university life is largely based on the concept of academic freedom - for example, freedom of research or the expression of original views by professors. And in general, student years sometimes seem to be a real freeman - there is time to get together with friends and have fun, the working day "from 9 to 6" is still unfamiliar to many, so why, on top of everything, not let people from the street to lectures? They are also interested, they also want to study ...
In different historical and geographical circumstances, this issue was resolved in different ways. In pre-revolutionary Russia, as you have already understood from the aforementioned names, in many respects positively.
But if in relation to young men the opportunity to attend classes at a particular university was discussed individually, then women were considered as a class: they can all cross the university threshold even with such rights - or not. In the early 1860s, the majority on the council of Moscow University did not want to see women on student benches. At St. Petersburg University, the council turned out to be more liberal, at Kazan University - even more liberal, and in Kiev and Kharkov women were given student rights and even allowed to acquire academic degrees. And when, a decade later, a number of Higher Courses for Women (which gradually acquired an increasingly university character) opened across the country, the status of an auditor existed for some time as well.
Until October 1917, the rules for admission to volunteers could be determined by the educational institution itself. So, the Moscow Archaeological Institute accepted quite a lot of volunteers, and they could take exams. The training was paid. And after the revolution, anyone who turned 16 could choose a university to go there as an auditor and not pay anything. (Russians on the other side of the USSR could sometimes study in the same status - for example, Russian émigrés at the Theological Institute of St. Vladimir in Chinese Harbin.) But in the end, the system of evening and correspondence education that developed in the USSR supplanted studies as a volunteer.
In modern Russia there are universities that recruit volunteers according to their own rules. Independent Moscow University (Moscow), focused on in-depth mathematical education (the diploma of this educational institution is recognized by Harvard), allows free listeners to attend classes and allows them to pass the introductory session. And the University of Practical Psychology, also located in the capital, has organized a special paid stream for volunteers, where you can study, including in absentia, as well as take exams and write a thesis. A state diploma, however, is not allowed for such a student, but if he can transfer to student status, he will receive the rights due to students.
Abroad, the picture differs from country to country, from university to university. For example, in the universities of Great Britain and the USA there are departments for volunteers, in Germany the percentage of volunteers has increased recently, and in Poland, which is closer to us, the institute of volunteers is alive and well - and if an applicant did not get a student place, he can still attend classes, visit laboratories, borrow study materials from the library and take exams. Nevertheless, such a "free listener" does not have a student card, and the system of credits does not apply to him - the accumulated educational points, he cannot be drawn up an individual curriculum and given an academic leave. When a year of this semi-student existence has passed, the question of including the free listener in the lists of students is being considered.
If free listening is prohibited somewhere, then most often this happens when other students pay for their studies, and those who would like to become a free listener did not pay for the course.
Will you be allowed to listen to the lectures
In the Russian Law on Education, there is no talk of volunteers. (Do you have a USE? So take the USE - and do as you should.) But they are "sometimes seen" - now in one university, then in another. Ghost Students! So do they manage to get there or not?
In addition to the law, the very routine of the life of the university is often not designed for free listeners. Only students and teachers enter the academic buildings without problems (if it is not an open day, of course). So, probably, they will catch you at the door of the university and send you home. And yet, the issue is resolved in each specific university in its own way: somewhere there are no volunteers as a class, somewhere you can ask about the topics of lectures you are interested in by contacting the university, and as a result, agree with the teaching staff, and somewhere even write an application in the entire form, and at the end of the course receive a certificate.
It would be most interesting for those wishing to become volunteers to observe the natural educational process from the back. And, since such an opportunity is not always available, you can consider other proposals of universities - for example, open lectures. They are arranged on purpose and are sometimes outside the context of the course studied by the bulk of students, but many of these lectures can be attended by everyone - and feel the atmosphere of the university, where you may soon be enrolling.
Another thing is that today you can feel the atmosphere of universities located anywhere in the world without leaving your home.
Forecasts
Will the institution of audiences be preserved in its original, full-time version, if universities today tend to simply post lectures online, and the number of subscribers to many of their channels on YouTube and other resources is calculated in huge numbers; if the best universities in the world unite in the Coursera project, and universities around the world - in the OpenCourseWare project, if it has become customary to freely share university knowledge on the Internet? Everything is clear with students: they also need a diploma! They will still go to universities. But the mass recruitment of remote audiences jeopardizes your desire to sit at least a little on the most real student bench and listen to a lecture on a real student stream - without being a student at the same time. Stay at home, they say, launch a video of the university - and arrange free hearings for yourself as much as you like. So you will have vocational guidance with preparatory courses, and you don't need to go anywhere. And in general, now there is a lot of any information - you bought whatever textbook you want and study it yourself.
Self-education is a good thing. Today it is considered even more worthy occupation than studying "in the ranks" of students: after all, a self-taught person is better motivated and he personally decides what exactly he will teach, and the student is content with what he is asked. However, a supporter of self-education is unnecessarily attached to his own achievements and therefore often slows down. But the student easily puts aside the next solved test - one after another - and as a result, he moves faster in mastering the course! Therefore, there is always a reason to become either a full-time student, or at least an auditor.
In general, it is not necessary to want to become a volunteer. It's good to just think about this phenomenon. After all, there were and are people who do not attach much importance to the diploma, but respect knowledge so much that they want to receive it, even if not in the general student stream, but modestly sitting on the edge of the classroom. It makes sense to try to achieve this craving for knowledge in any case - it will come in handy when you become a student!
A free listener is a student who has the opportunity to freely attend university studies without being officially enrolled and without the right to receive a diploma. In the West, you receive certificates for listening to lectures and courses, but in Russian universities you will most likely receive nothing but knowledge itself.
Our institute of volunteers was popular in pre-revolutionary times, but now it has fallen into decay. Most Russian universities reasonably refer to the fact that the very concept of “free listener” simply does not exist in the country's modern educational legislation. I turned to MGIMO, RUDN, Russian State Linguistic University, Pleshka, Baumanka and MIPT - and they all deny access to outside students. Nevertheless, we managed to find several universities, into which, with perseverance and a certain skill, you can infiltrate as a free listener.
MSU
At Moscow State University, as it should be in classical universities, there is a practice of free attending classes, so theoretically there is an opportunity to become a listener, but in practice, free access to knowledge is difficult due to administrative difficulties: in order to enter Moscow State University, you must have a pass or student card university, otherwise the guards will not let you through.
Advice: you need to decide which lectures you want to attend (at which faculty, which department, at what time) and send your request to the mail of the chosen faculty. The success of the venture depends both on the favor of the head of the department and on the loyalty of the corps guards. If the department answers you with consent, ask its staff to draw up a letter for the guard with the following content: "Department of such and such asks to let (full name + passport data) on such and such days, at such and such time, to the audience such and such." Always have your passport with you and try to get the phones of the department's laboratory technicians so that in case of difficulties they can meet you at the entrance.
High School of Economics
The HSE has special disciplines available to everyone - university-wide electives. You need to have time to sign up for them in time, then you will have the opportunity to attend courses on leadership strategy, and on historical conflict resolution, and on the basics of web design. There is a special option for applicants - students of preparatory courses at HSE can attend some of the first-year lectures. And for those who then enter the university, these lectures will be credited in advance.
But attending any classes of a particular faculty is not observed in mass practice.
Advice: if you have a specific request and you clearly know which lectures you would like to attend, you can try to negotiate the conditions for attending classes with the faculty administration.
RSUH
At the Russian State University for the Humanities, free listeners are welcome, so anyone can attend lectures free of charge. True, you will have to solve the problem of the pass yourself - no one will be puzzled by this especially for you.
Advice: the university administration advises to get a pass either through friends or by contacting the admissions office.
VGIK
There is a fairly strict access system (students have special cards for passing through the turnstile), but for those who really want to get inside, in order to be in the company of potential cameramen, directors, screenwriters and actors at least for a while, there is a way out. Most classes are held in small groups, and you will not get into them, but you are welcome to film screenings for the entire university.
Advice: in the fall, when the pass cards have not yet been made to all new applicants, it is quite possible to go inside with a group of other students, showing the guard from a distance something resembling a student's.
The Higher School of Economics has opened an enrollment for free university-wide electives, which can be attended not only by HSE students, but also by everyone. The courses for these electives were selected by a special university commission. The choice of topics is very wide - from programming in Python to the megalopolises of the world, from argumentation in English to Islamic fundamentalism in the modern world. Read more about these electives in the questions and answers.
What are “university-wide electives”?
These are author's training courses in various areas of training. University-wide electives have long taken their place in the educational space of the university. Every year HSE launches a whole pool of such courses of varying duration (from one month to two semesters) and topics. Humanities were pioneers: the first 10 electives were launched in 2003 by staff. This year, the university offers over 50 courses that represent the four main areas of university education: economics and management, mathematics and engineering, humanities and social sciences.
Who can visit them?
Both HSE students or staff members and those who have nothing to do with the university but want to broaden their horizons, get acquainted with new areas of modern science, and gain additional knowledge and competencies can study at university-wide electives. It doesn't matter how old you are, what your basic education is, if you are interested in some problematic, you have a research enthusiasm - come.
Is it free for everyone, even those who are not from HSE?
Yes, courses are free for absolutely everyone.
Which of the electives are the most interesting?
It is difficult to assess the "interestingness", it all depends on individual preferences. There are courses that have been taught for more than a year and have their own audience, for example, or. There are those that start this year for the first time: "Physics of Condensed Matter: Basic Ideas and Contemporary Challenges", "Byzantine Culture", etc.
There are applied courses, such as "Applied Economic Analysis in STATA", "Programming in Python for Data Collection and Analysis", and there are courses that allow you to take a fresh look at the whole history of mankind that can change your worldview - "Islamic fundamentalism in the modern world ”.
A complete list of electives can be found.
How to enroll in university-wide electives?
Registration of students for courses is carried out electronically through the LMS system:
1. Students of the Higher School of Economics log into the LMS system using their username and password and register by selecting the Elective Courses tab.
2. External participants can apply electronically at.
Some electives conduct additional self-registration on the pages of their courses:, course.
I'm not sure if I can go to every lecture. Will they deduct for the passes?
The elective is your free choice, you decide whether you want to attend it. But by signing up for a course, you take on some obligations and, above all, to yourself. For absences from classes, they are not expelled, but nevertheless, the rules for attending electives are regulated by each teacher individually. The internal logic of some courses is that if you skip a lot, you will not be able to master the entire course.
Do you have to take exams at the end?
The exam is voluntary, even for HSE students. In case of successful passing of the test, HSE students receive credits for the studied elective and can enter it in the Appendix of their future diploma. External students of some electives, such as ISITI electives, may qualify for a certificate.
When will the class schedule be known?
The university-wide electives are very different and they start at different times (September, October, November, January and March). You can get acquainted with the schedule on the website of each elective or department responsible for its implementation.
Where will the electives take place?
Lectures will be held at different venues of the Higher School of Economics.
When will they take place?
Mostly in the evening from 18.10 to 21.00.
More about electives -.
September 11 Patch: m we received about 35 thousand applications from 13 thousand potential listeners, i.e. on average, everyone chose at least 3 electives for themselves. Our teachers are very glad that the courses they offer arouse such keen interest, but since the possibilities of the university and lecturers are not limitless, we had to stop recording a week after it started.
Auditor
Hearer
Anyone who is admitted to studies and exams in a higher education institution without enrollment in the number of students (in the Russian state until 1917) .
Efremova's Explanatory Dictionary... T.F. Efremova. 2000.
See what the "Volunteer" is in other dictionaries:
Auditor ... Spelling dictionary-reference
LISTENER, auditor, husband. (pre-Rev.). A person who was admitted to listening to lectures and other classes in a higher educational institution without enrolling in students. Ushakov's explanatory dictionary. D.N. Ushakov. 1935 1940 ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary
LISTENER, me, husband. (obsolete). A person listening to lectures at a higher education institution without enrolling in students. | wives auditor, s. Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 ... Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary
A volunteer is a person who attends a higher educational institution and is admitted to all types of educational activities and to state exams, but without granting him the rights and benefits of an ordinary student. Before the October Revolution in Russian ... ... Wikipedia
A person admitted to all types of studies in a higher educational institution, as well as to state exams (after passing all credits and course exams), but without the rights and benefits provided to Students. V. Institute existed in ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
A person admitted to listening to lectures and other activities in a higher educational institution, but not being a student. According to the university charter of 1863, V.'s admission was determined by the rules drawn up by the council of each university and approved ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron
Volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer (Source: “Full accentuated ... ... Forms of words
auditor- the usher said freely, I ... Russian spelling dictionary
Auditor- a person who is not a student, but attends lectures at a higher educational institution. (Bim Bad BM Pedagogical encyclopedic dictionary. M., 2002. S. 40) ... Pedagogical terminological dictionary
auditor- (2 m); pl. free listeners / shatels, R. free listeners / shatels ... Spelling dictionary of the Russian language
Books
- Great masters Konstantin Trutovsky set of reproductions of paintings,. Konstantin Trutovsky is a majestic classic, the author of huge paintings and small-sized household works from the life of Little Russian people. ... While studying at the Military Engineering School in St. Petersburg, K. ...
- Great masters. Konstantin Trutovsky (set of 24 reproductions),. Konstantin Trutovsky is a majestic classic, the author of huge paintings and small-sized household works from the life of Little Russian people. While studying at the Military Engineering School in St. Petersburg, K. ...