Abstract:

Since 2006, the innovative national education project is being implemented in Russia which is the establishing of Federal universities. Thus far, there are ten Federal universities in Russia that interact actively with each other through a certain association – a Club called «the Great 10/the Club of 10» or «G-10». According to main ideas of the project Federal universities are not just a simple merging of regional universities. They should introduce completely novel modalities of educational marketing such as training of modern qualified staff for the field of administration and management, economics, and science; basic and applied scientific research in priority areas; effective collaboration with the Russian Academy of Sciences and regional business structures; promotion of a strong international cooperation.

There is no doubt about political, economical or sociocultural relevance of the project to the improvement of Russian educational system. At the same time, it should be mentioned that the process of implementing the project was accompanied by a number of challenges at the domestic level in almost all of the universities. The challenges were generated by consolidation of similar structures with significant educational, personnel and technological divergence. To a large extent, this process has affected general-studies departments such as of Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Foreign languages and others. The heterogeneity of staff and pedagogic approaches to the organization of the educational process did not always contribute to the establishment of a coherent system of substantive training in relevant disciplines.

The article suggests a possible course of action to be taken to solve some encountered challenges using the cluster approach methodology which is shown by the example of work of the Department of Physics, Far East Federal University (Vladivostok, Russia). The concept of educational cluster «Department of Physics of the Federal University» was introduced. The article also proposes its structure which consists of three components: educational-methodological, tutoring and technological domains. The functionality of each domain, as well as possible interaction mechanisms within the cluster structure are described. Technological means of designing ontology of educational field «Physics» are presented, that is the graph method accompanied by the usage of quantitative methods of physical content integrity and frame method, all of which allows illustrating the semantic complexity of physical knowledge. The article justifies the feasibility of cluster organization of the work of the Department of Physics to create a positive emotional background in a «teacher-student» relationship system. Prospective directions of the proposed cluster targeted towards building additional paths of interaction within the cluster as well as towards broadening its structure are discussed.

Keywords:

Federal university, cluster approach, educational cluster «Department of Physics of Federal university», cluster domain, cluster navigation.