Abstract:

The pandemic has significantly changed social reality. COVID-19 is considered to be a catalyst for the intensification of many processes that were actively developed in the previous period, including higher education. Russian higher education and overseas countries universities face new challenges: digitalization of education; the digital divide in the digital culture of the younger and elder generations of lecturers, students’ and lecturers’ educational practices deconstruction and etc. The higher education system is undergoing transformations, in which there is an increasing gap in the university students ‘ education, where initially there were different conditions for the transition to distant education (the presence of distant education in the "pre-pandemic" period, material and technical base, university profile and taught disciplines and etc).

The purposes of the study were to examine the Russian university students ‘and lecturers’ attitudes towards the change in the educational process during the transition to distance learning and to determine students’ and lecturers’ educational practices deconstruction.

The research methodology combines qualitative and quantitative methods. In March-May 2020, we carried out the study at the universities of Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Chelyabinsk. 500 students were questioned who were forced to pass over to distant education due to the threat of COVID-19. The in-depth interviews (N = 20) with experts were conducted, the average conversation duration was 90 minutes. A frame analysis of students’ cases was also carried out (N = 42).

Results:
The survey has revealed the following features of distant education and deconstruction of educational practices:
• Transition from students’ standardized to individual educational trajectories, which allows them to actively participate in the creation of new knowledge and to be engaged in self-education. Meanwhile, the majority of students (65.0%) are not ready for independent educational and scientific research. Moreover, about 40.0% of respondents indicate that distant education demotivates their educational activities;
• Assessment system changing which requires students to independently work with educational material, structures it, and comprehends it. Meanwhile, some students (about 30.0%) note that lecturers do not always give an objective assessment of their knowledge;
• Universities educational space changing, with the inclusion of on-line educational technologies. At the same time, every second respondent notes that he \ she is ready to return to the classroom and study off-line;
Students’ fear of possible unemployment after graduation and lecturers’ fear of future professional activities in the conditions of distant education.

In addition, the study has shown that lecturers faced the need to change teaching methods: online monitoring students’ training is more difficult than that of off-line, lecturers are not able to see students, and sometimes to hear them. One other common issue is unstable operation of technical devices such as low Internet speed, equipment breakdowns and extraneous noise.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made its own changes in the educational process in Russian higher education and abroad, which requires further sociological research.

Keywords:

Transformation of higher education, digitalization, distant education, higher education, pandemic, deconstruction of educational practices, problems and contradictions, Russia.