Abstract:

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), which began at the end of December 2019 and spread across the globe in less than two months, is considered the most contagious and aggressive virus in the last hundred years. As a result, as part of coronavirus lockdown the World Health Organization recommended that country leaders and health authorities enforce a quarantine to protect their citizens from this disease.
One of the most important restrictive measures taken in connection with COVID-19 in the field of education was the suspension of intramural educational activities in all centers and at all levels of education. Governments developed a number of means of organizing training in the existing situation, among which special mention should go to the provision of continuing education through the transition of educational systems to distance learning.
The forced emergency transition to a distance learning format at universities at the beginning of 2020 posed difficult issues for education systems of all countries of the world to organize continuous training of students, conduct certification tests, and maintain the stability of the institute of education as a whole.
It is worth noting that within the framework of training highly qualified personnel, one of the key requirements for obtaining a PhD degree is to defend a dissertation only in intramural format. However, during the coronavirus pandemic, members of dissertation councils were allowed not to gather for defense in full, but to participate in meetings remotely through video conference.
It is important to emphasize that the process of defending doctoral thesis was very complicated by the transition to distance education. This problem became especially evident during the defense of a doctoral dissertation on a double PhD degree program between different universities.
The relevance of this work is predetermined by one of the most difficult and pressing problems in the organization of education, which arose in 2020–2021: the emergency transition of educational organizations to a distance learning format in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown requirements.
The purpose of the work is to review the problems that have developed in 2020–2021 in the process of implementing online defenses under the co-supervised, double PhD degree program of the University Grenoble-Alpes and RUDN University, as well as under the double PhD degree program “History, Art History and Geography” of the University of the Balearic Islands and RUDN University.
The methods of analysis, analogy, generalization were used in the study.
As a result, the article describes the main difficulties and problems of distance learning and defense in the framework of the double PhD degree program between the University of the Balearic Islands and RUDN University, as well as in the framework of the co-supervised, double PhD degree program of the University Grenoble-Alpes and RUDN University during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020-2021; some solutions to the problems of using distance learning and defense in the framework of training of highly qualified personnel.

Keywords:

Double program, PhD, co-supervised, online education, coronavirus.