Abstract:

On-line collaboration has become a vital necessity and a beneficial instrument of providing continuous educational process under the COVID-19 pandemic. Since health security reasons forced governments to introduce lockdown and social distancing rules, the educational establishments in many countries made considerable efforts to meet new demands.
The paper focuses on the results of the research into advantages and disadvantages of on-line collaboration in educational process. Students and teaching staff of the linguist and non-linguist faculties of the MGIMO University and MIIT University took part in 7 questionnaires which were especially elaborated to find out the attitude of students and teaching staff to on-line education, its challenges and opportunities. All in all 217 students and 25 members of the teaching staff (tutors, teachers and lecturers) participated in the research with the use of case-based reasoning system to analyze on-line collaboration between students, between students and teaching staff, between members of the teaching staff in digital learning and educational environment.
The first two questionnaires were aimed to assess students’ abilities to adapt to new educational rules and learning environment. They proved that it was rather easy for most students to embrace changes in educational approaches and procedures. In some cases remote work with the use of IT technologies had been implemented long before the COVID-19 pandemic. The universities participating in the research had introduced mentorship and internship programmes, business incubator facilities with videoconferencing classes and supportive collaboration tools before the pandemic broke out. And those faculties that had elaborated and introduced IT innovations in their educational process beforehand find themselves more confident and independent in times of COVID-19 crisis.
The third and fourth questionnaire estimated the attitude of educators to new challenges of the digital educational environment. The research has exposed the so-called “generation gap”: most elderly professors have voted for traditional in-person collaboration, meanwhile there is a rather high percentage of “active” professors who have demonstrated eagerness and diligence in acquiring new skills of working in digital environment. Most educators confess that getting used to new tools and methods of digital education is just a matter of time.
The rest of the questionnaires testify that the overwhelming majority of interviewees observe that on-line collaboration serves the interests of protecting human health as well as corresponds to the qualification requirements modern employers seek and encourage in personnel. Nowadays employers quite often expect their staff to work in virtual teams, geographically dispersed. So students should be taught to work and learn digitally: to use the Internet resources effectively, to demonstrate acumen and self-discipline, to brush up their public speaking and presentation skills. Thus, on-line collaboration should pursue these goals.

Keywords:

digital education, learning environment, on-line collaboration.