Teachers’ Smart Up started in January 2022 as a five-day online intensive for educators. It was an experiment by the Sigma Software University team: to give Ukrainian educators practical tools from industry experts and help bring curricula and teaching methods in line with today’s demands. The first season brought together 577 participants, and within five years the project grew into one of Ukraine’s largest educational communities: 10,000 educators who keep their knowledge up to date together amid technological change and war.
The Teachers’ Smart Up team runs this online event twice a year, in winter and summer. Not a single season has been skipped, even during the full-scale war. The tenth, anniversary season in summer 2026 set a record: 2,591 registrations and 300–400 participants online every day from every corner of Ukraine — from major universities to small territorial communities.
How Teachers’ Smart Up Was Born
“The specialists of the future grow alongside educators who think ahead and shape tomorrow’s trends today.”
This belief is where the project’s story began.
Sigma Software University, Sigma Software’s educational platform, has been working with Ukrainian educational institutions since 2016. Today, there are more than 100 of them: universities, professional pre-higher education colleges, and vocational schools. The company’s experts sit on supervisory boards and state examination committees, help update curricula, and teach and mentor future IT professionals.
From the very beginning, Sigma Software University’s goal was simple: to support educators with practical industry expertise so that students gain knowledge that truly prepares them for work. For the IT industry, this is an investment in the quality of future professionals: the more up-to-date the curricula and teaching methods, the better prepared students are when they enter the job market.
The pandemic changed the format of this collaboration. Meetings moved online, and the team did its best to stay close to educators and students in a time of constant change. It was then, in late 2021, that it became clear: educators needed more than access to individual lectures — they needed a space of their own to grow. A place where they could learn from industry experts, ask questions, exchange experience with colleagues from other cities and institutions, and receive official recognition of their professional development.
And so, in January 2022, the first Teachers’ Smart Up took place: five days of hands-on workshops and lectures by Sigma Software experts, with tools participants could take straight into the classroom. The five-day structure has stood the test of time and remains the backbone of the program, while everything else — topics, platform, speaker lineup, certification — has been refined season after season to meet the audience’s needs.
A few weeks later, the full-scale war broke out. But the community held together. To stay connected with educators between intensives, the team created a Telegram channel: a place to ask questions, share experience, and find support, no matter what was happening around them. In summer 2022, the second season took place, and in its very first year Teachers’ Smart Up brought together more than 1,000 educators from across the country
“This summer school from Sigma Software reminds me of a ray of light in the dark, conservative realm of technical education. A sip of cool water on a hot day in the middle of a desert,” wrote Oleh Hlukhov, a lecturer at Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, after one of the seasons.
Ten Seasons in Numbers — and in People
Over five years, Teachers’ Smart Up has brought together more than 10,000 educators from 150+ educational institutions. More than 100 experts have joined the project — from engineers and data analysts to top executives, including Sigma Software Group CEO Valerii Krasovskyi; Maksym Pochebut, Chief Learning Officer at Sigma Software Group and CEO of Sigma Software University; Yevheniia Klepa, Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at SET University; and many others.
The experts have delivered lectures and workshops covering the full spectrum of modern IT education: from AI/ML and cybersecurity to project management and soft skills. Participants who have completed every season have earned up to 10 ECTS credits — 300 hours of officially recognized professional development.
But numbers are only half the story. The project is designed so that learning doesn’t end with the last lecture: two seasons a year, winter and summer, five days of 2–3 hours online each, and between seasons — a Telegram community that has grown to 1,300+ members. That’s where educators keep asking experts questions, sharing their own practices, and finding like-minded peers.
Over time, the project gained recognition at the national level. Partners of Teachers’ Smart Up now include the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, IT Ukraine Association, the Kharkiv, Lviv, and Zakarpattia IT Clusters, and the Ukrainian Startup Fund. In 2025, the program reached beyond Ukraine for the first time, as international experts Elissavet Likoyanni (Connectus) and Anna Riga (The Square Dot team BV) joined the speaker lineup. Since then, every season has been enriched with international expertise, helping educators take a broader view of how education is evolving and stay in tune with global change.
Want to see the project in action? Watch this video:
https://youtu.be/KvIOQyTWH64?si=aSHkw_E2I9dor4iQ
How It Works
Over ten seasons, a full-fledged educational infrastructure has grown around the program. Learning takes place on the proprietary LMS platform of Sigma Software University: each participant has a personal account with lecture recordings, presentations, and additional materials, while registration and certification are fully automated. Day-to-day questions are handled by a Telegram bot that collects the most frequently asked questions and answers, and if a request is non-standard, a manager steps in and communicates with the participant personally.
After each season, participants receive a professional development certificate with an academic credit (30 hours, 1 ECTS) in Ukrainian and English. The certificate comes with an annex detailing the topics covered and the number of hours for each, so the educational institution sees not only that the training took place but also what it involved.
The document meets the requirements of the Procedure for Professional Development of Teaching and Academic Staff, approved by Resolution No. 800 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, and is officially recognized as professional development. The certificate’s authenticity can be verified at any time at university.sigma.software/certificates.
The team shapes each season’s topics based on participant feedback and real industry needs, which is why satisfaction has held steady at 98% for all five years.
The Anniversary Year: Two Record-Breaking Seasons
The 2026 winter season received more than 1,360 applications and, for the first time, brought together programs for university lecturers and school teachers — from applied mathematics and STEM projects to agentic AI systems and artificial intelligence tools for designers.
The 2026 summer season was the largest in the project’s history: 2,591 registrations, 12 lectures, 13 speakers, and representatives of more than 60 educational institutions. AI-related topics drew the most interest: AI-ready course, AI agents and the future of IT education, and the interaction between educator, student, and AI. This is a telling shift: educators are no longer asking whether to use AI in teaching, but how to integrate it responsibly. Practical scenarios for such integration have become one of the key trends of recent seasons, from AI-ready courses to lessons where students learn to critically fact-check AI-generated content.
The participants themselves made the anniversary season special: for the first time, teachers and lecturers from the project’s community, who had followed Teachers’ Smart Up as attendees for years, took the stage as speakers. The exchange of experience now works both ways.
A special chapter of the anniversary year is the participation of military personnel. Throughout 2026, more than 150 members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and their families completed the training free of charge and received professional development certificates with ECTS academic credit. For the project team, this is one of the most important outcomes of the year — and a way to support those who, despite the war and all its challenges, continue to teach young people and keep Ukrainian education at a high standard.
How Educators Put Their New Skills into Practice
Yet the program’s real value lies not in the number of certificates issued, but in what participants do with their new knowledge after the intensive. They tell it best themselves.
“Sincere thanks to the organizers for a high-quality educational project and the opportunity to learn, exchange experience, and be inspired by new ideas. The knowledge I gained will certainly be useful in my work and help improve the educational process,” — Alina Sasyn, Drohobych Pedagogical University, summer 2026 season participant.
“Thank you, Sigma Software University, for an engaging intensive and a fresh perspective on how modern technology can support learning without replacing the thinking process,” — Mariia Ryzhova, Junior QA Engineer, summer 2026 season participant.
Here’s what it looks like in practice.
Olha Sanina, a senior-category lecturer and soft skills trainer, completed Teachers’ Smart Up in summer 2025. In the months that followed, she applied what she had learned in Kharkiv IT Cluster projects, moderated a national webinar for 500 participants, contributed to the development of a new professional standard, and was selected through a competitive process as a trainer-facilitator at the Right to Protection charitable foundation. “Teachers’ Smart Up became a catalyst for new opportunities, boosted my confidence, and gave me tools that really work,” she says.
Sometimes the changes are less visible from the outside, but they are exactly what reaches students. After the intensive, one participant created her own interactive English lesson in which students look for errors in AI-generated materials and learn to evaluate information critically.
Tetiana Mandryka, a lecturer in the Software Engineering subject committee at the Professional College of Rocket and Space Engineering of Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, integrated what she learned into her teaching and developed a new module for the “Leadership and Teamwork” course.
And this is not an isolated case. Entire departments come to Teachers’ Smart Up as teams and then introduce new practices at their institutions, from updating curricula to creating school science centers.
Speakers keep coming back, too. More than 100 experts have become project ambassadors: they run additional courses, create content for educators, and help their attendees’ students gain their first hands-on industry experience.
And the inspiration here works both ways. Here’s how Yaroslav Sohor — historian, education expert at the NGO “Space of Public Initiatives,” and speaker at the anniversary summer season — described his experience:
“I had the honor of speaking at Teachers’ Smart Up: Summer Edition 2026, and I must admit that I haven’t experienced such intellectual and emotional delight in a very long time. What fundamentally sets this event apart from others? Today, there is often a communication gap between secondary and higher education — schools and universities frequently live in their own separate worlds. Yet the organizers managed to break this familiar pattern and build a genuine dialogue. The event brought school teachers, university lecturers, education administrators, vocational educators, and representatives of the IT community together at one virtual table.”
Recognition
Teachers’ Smart Up was named one of the top three non-commercial initiatives for the development of the IT industry at the DOU Award 2025, and the project’s contribution helped Sigma Software rank among Ukraine’s TOP 5 business investors in education according to Delo.ua and the Kyiv School of Economics. In 2026, the program received the “Jury’s Choice” award at the People First Award in the Corporate Social Responsibility category and was shortlisted for the international PRWeek Global Awards.
What’s Next
The next step is going beyond Ukraine. The team is planning a future international season of Teachers’ Smart Up and building a global community of educators where teachers, experts, and innovators from different countries can learn together. At the same time, the project is expanding its focus on school teachers and continues to explore the potential of artificial intelligence in education.
The eleventh season is already on the horizon. To make sure you don’t miss the start of registration, subscribe to our Telegram channel.
Important! You can also watch the lecture recordings from three seasons and purchase a certificate with 1 ECTS credit:
- Summer 2025 season — watch the course and get your certificate
- Winter 2026 season — watch the course and get your certificate
- Summer 2026 season — watch the course and get your certificate
Choose the season you need and follow the link.
If you’re an expert and would like to speak at upcoming seasons or get involved in the project, email us at university@sigma.software. Or fill out this speaker form. We’re always open to new voices.
The project began as a series of online workshops for 577 educators. Today, it is a community of more than 10,000 people who not only teach others but also prove every season that Ukrainian education can change, endure, and keep moving forward. Ten seasons is an important milestone, but for Teachers’ Smart Up it’s more of a starting point. New countries, new partners, and new seasons lie ahead!
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