This article introduces Russia's international development assistance to global education, specifically the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) programme. This study utilises analysis of literature and reports based on the READ programme’s background, structure, stakeholders and procedure. The objective of this research is to illustrate READ's key characteristics that helped it to succeed and lessons they have learned. Results show that READ is a well-planned, triangular cooperation programme requiring further study due to its applicability to other emerging donors. Moreover, this study sees a need for more research in education development assistance of not only Russia, but also other emerging donors.

Recently, the interest in the educational robotics has grown greatly, but few studies have been conducted in this field. This study intended to investigate the trend of usage robotics in education during the period of 2001-2014 while analyzing 133 research papers to find the answers to the following questions. First, what is the general research trend of utilizing robotics in education? Second, what are the most recent issues and challenges of robotics in education? Publications have been analyzed using quantitative analysis and cross-tabulation. All gathered articles have been categorized and analyzed under twelve categories. Furthermore, seven categories have been cross-tabulated with other categories. Overall findings present that there are a significant amount of publications on higher and secondary education. Articles on early education and teachers training have started to become more apparent lately. It has also been noticed that robotics generally is seen as an extracurricular activity. Among educational robots, ‘robot kit’ type was one of the highly utilized, especially LEGO Mindstorms robot kit. The main objective of most analyzed articles is the experience of a course curriculum. Results of the study show that there are three main issues and challenges of robotics in education. First, there is a lack of quantitative research on the impact of robotics in education. Second is an absence of well-defined curriculum for target audience. Third is the narrow use of robotics in education. The study also present recommendations for future research.

The purpose of this research was to identify the situation of ICT use in education in the Russian region, its reasons, and possible problems and solutions. In order to achieve the attempted purpose, analysis was done on thirteen individual and collaborative final presentations of 34 Russian (Sakha) trainees who attended the APEC e-Learning Training Program during 2007-2013 and Russian government project on ICT in education. The results of the research are as follows. First, the most mentioned problem and need to the Russian education informatization was identified as a shortage of ICT equipment. The next two problems identified were the problem of the insufficiency of educational resources and lack of teacher motivation in using ICT. Third, the implementation of ICT in Russian schools should become one of the important objectives of the region’s education administration and school administration. Thus, Russian regional government officials, who are responsible for education, need training to implement better policies and measures for improvements of ICT use in education. Also it’s important for them to learn the best foreign experience in using ICT in Education and adapt it by taking into consideration culture, geographical and other regional features.