Abstract:

Digitalization is ubiquitous. This tendency has not been spared either by education or higher education.

The period of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 led to the fact that most of the higher educational institutions of the Russian Federation were transferred to distance education as a compulsory measure. However, this trend continued in the fall of 2020, when the worsening epidemiological situation in the country once again forced the country's universities to use distance education. On the one hand, the use of distance technologies made it possible to continue training in accordance with educational programs without deviations in terms. But, on the other hand, the question of the quality of such education is very acute. The issue of the quality of education and its assessment is very broad. In this study, it is proposed to consider only one of the facets that characterize the quality of education, namely: the progress of students of higher educational institutions of the Russian Federation before and during the pandemic, that is, before the introduction of distance education and using distance technologies.

In the case of full-time classroom education, a qualitative assessment of a student's education is the teacher's professional judgment based on a number of factors: personal communication, attendance, activity in the classroom, checkpoints, mastering competencies, etc. In the case of distance education, the role of control points in determining the student's progress sharply increases. Personal "live" communication between teacher and student is practically excluded from the assessment of student progress. The question arises: how much does such an exclusion affect the quality of education? After all, historically, traditionally, demonstratively and so on, it was the teacher's professional judgment on the basis of personal “live” communication that determined the quality of the student's education.

The study attempts to determine how much the exclusion of personal "live" communication between teacher and student influenced the students' assessments. The study was carried out within the framework of the Kazan Federal (Volga Region) University in the discipline "Accounting" for 2017-2020. The research examines the ratings of the 2nd year students studying in the direction of "Economics". The results of the study show that the quality of education, during the period of application of distance technologies, has significantly dropped. The study attempts to collect the reasons that could influence such a result, to characterize them and identify ways to solve these problems.

The study proposes to identify the following groups of reasons that influenced the decline in student performance during a pandemic:
• underdeveloped information infrastructure,
• lack of provision of disciplines with electronic educational resources,
• lack of readiness of teachers to use digital platforms and services in the educational process;
• stressful situation for all participants;
• unreasonable use of the terms online education, distance education, etc.;
• motivation of students and their involvement in the process;
• lack of necessary skills among all participants in the process;
• administrative.

Ultimately, it is much more important to draw conclusions from this "global experiment" and organize systematic work on mistakes in order to avoid these mistakes in the future.

Keywords:

Digital education, quality of education, academic performance.