They want to ban bloggers from illegally earning money on educational courses

Bloggers should be prohibited from illegally earning money from educational courses, as well as promising government-issued documents after such training. The Ministry of Education proposed to prepare such amendments to the legislation in the Federation Council Committee on rules and organization of parliamentary activities, Izvestia found out.

"According to Rospotrebnadzor, the number of complaints about paid educational services has increased significantly. Most of the complaints relate to non—compliance with the terms of contracts for the provision of paid educational services, the lack of key information on the official websites of educational organizations, the legality of changing the cost of services during the training process, the inclusion of conditions in the contract that deliberately infringe on consumer rights, etc.," says the document sent to the ministry signed by the head of the Federation Council Committee Vyacheslav Timchenko.

The document also notes that cases of poor-quality provision of educational services have become more frequent on the Internet, including by organizations and individual entrepreneurs who do not have the appropriate license, when educational activities are replaced by outright fraud and the provision of near-scientific knowledge.

"Cases of spreading false information that one or another "infoblogger" issues state-issued documents are regularly recorded. It is particularly noted that a significant part of paid educational and pseudo—educational services are offered through various private digital platforms," the document emphasizes.

In this regard, the senators suggest that the Ministry of Education take a number of measures. Among other things, consider the expediency of prohibiting licensing and implementation of educational programs using exclusively e-learning and distance learning technologies, for which there are no federal government requirements, or approximate, standard programs, as well as professional standards.

The Ministry is also invited to consider the possibility of amending the law "On Education in the Russian Federation" prohibiting organizations and sole proprietors who do not implement educational programs of higher education from using the words "institute", "university", "academy" in their names.

In addition, it is proposed to consider the expediency of tightening liability for organizations and individual entrepreneurs who disseminate false information about ongoing educational programs, including the issuance of state-issued documents based on the results of training.

"In recent years, we have noted a steady increase in the popularity of paid online education and the demand for this service among consumers. However, along with bona fide companies, a large number of pseudo-educators and outright scammers operate in this market. An important role in this is played by various educational platforms that have not established proper control over the entrepreneurs allowed on their sites and the services they promote," explained Senator Alexander Lutovinov, a member of the rules committee, to Izvestia.

According to him, the task of legislators, together with relevant departments and the expert community, is to create conditions under which decent businesses will continue to develop unhindered and provide high-quality services to consumers, and unscrupulous players will have to bring their activities in line with mandatory requirements or leave the market.

"Unfortunately, consumers currently lack simple and understandable guidelines for choosing paid educational products and providers of such services. This is not facilitated by the entrepreneurs themselves, who often provide services without state registration, mislead consumers, hide their banking details, impose illegal terms of the contract, restrict consumers' rights to refund money from programs that did not fit or did not meet expectations," Oleg Pavlov, head of the Public Council at Rospotrebnadzor, explained to Izvestia.

According to him, in these circumstances, the question arises of developing simple and transparent criteria for the integrity of the information business.

"We intend to organize this work using the Luch information system developed by us, which aggregates information from various state information systems on compliance by business entities with the mandatory requirements established for their activities. In this way, we will not only be able to provide guidance to consumers, but we will also encourage entrepreneurs in this field to come out of the shadows and improve the quality of services provided," Oleg Pavlov explained.

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Yaroslav Nilov, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans' Affairs, stressed on August 25 that it was necessary to teach children to work and give them the opportunity to start earning money as early as possible. According to him, some bloggers imitate an idle lifestyle by showing photos against the background of expensive hotels and cars or trying on expensive jewelry. All this fake information is disorienting for young people and does not bring anything useful.

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