Abstract:

Russia has signed the Bologna Declaration and has entered the European Higher Education Area in 2003. Russian HEIs have gone through an invasive modernization process transmitting from a 5-year specialists’ training (Engineers’ degree) to a two-cycle system of higher education, introducing ECTS to the existing hourly-based curriculum, providing opportunities for students’ and staff’s mobility programs, etc. However the practice shows that the Russian way of implementing the Bologna process requirements differs greatly from those of the European countries, specifically when the issue of individual learning paths is addressed.

The system of higher education in Russia is based on a strict curriculum with a certain number of ECTS and a corresponding set of disciplines (courses), internships and research projects. Students enrolling for one major (specialty) are all required to undertake the same set of disciplines with a very few ECTS being open for election. This perplexes the process of educational trajectory (path) personification and limits students’ opportunities to develop competitive advantages in terms of unique competence formation for their future workplace.

These issues challenge the Russian educational society to search for creative ways to build up competitive advantages and create unique opportunities for prospective HEI students, since providing students with extra skills and competences valuable for the labor market would most likely result in the rise of study program’s attractiveness.

National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University and namely the Department of Management and Technology in Higher Professional Education have been conducting a research project on finding in-demand pairs of educational specialties and creating a system for development of harmonized pairs of Master programs’ curricula that would provide students with extra competences in a reduced period of time.

The goal of the project is to train specialists aiming to receive two Master degrees in two independent areas of knowledge in a reduced period of time providing them with a full set of professional competences for each area of knowledge and extra in-demand competences, such as ability to identify and solve interdisciplinary problems.

The research team has conducted an All-Russian research of prospective pairs of specialties demanded by industry representatives, HEI faculty and undergraduate students. The results of the questionnaire indicate that students and industry representatives show interest in the development of harmonized pairs of Master programs on a number of specialties that would provide graduates with extra competences allowing them to compete on the labor market more efficiently.

The practical part of the research projects consists of the development of a certain algorithm for the harmonization of popular specialties, which includes the identification of a competence matrix (indicating corresponding competences between two Master programs and allowing transferring ECTS between the programs), the development of harmonized curricula that indicates joint courses, research projects and internships aimed at fostering integrative interdisciplinary competences, the determination of practice-oriented problems and educational tasks in collaboration with industry to provide practical skills, a system for such programs' tuition fee identification, and the prospective benefits for future graduates, faculty and university, and potential employers.

Keywords:

Harmonized programs, extra competences, in-demand competences, curriculum modernization.