Abstract:

The educational sphere long before 2020 has formed a steady trend to the wide usage of IT. This trend created a revelation in scientific research and legal compliance requirements all over the world. Almost every educational institution formed each own recipe of a digital educational space.
Yet the 2020 pandemic and the governement policy to contain it became a special milestone of digital transformation in the universities in Russia and all over the world. Everyone had to face the requirements of total distance learning, confronting new digital challenges.

The article focuses on the technological aspects of the university digital transformation, digitalization-related problems, variable development levels of digital infrastructure and of the enterprise automated information systems for educational organizations.

It discusses e-learning and blended learning implementation, including pure distant learning. New aspects of educational management are considered, that educational organizations had to face during the Covid-19 pandemic. Special attention is drawn to the experience, that Federal State Budget Educational Organization for Higher Education “Moscow State University of Technology “STANKIN” has gained in 2020 under the pandemic circumstances. By 2020 STANKIN formed a serious digital backup, including an automated digital environment and learning management system with digital content for all the courses.

The paper also describes the new challenges, that the university had to face in 2020, such as the learning management system scalability, proctoring and the solutions to these challenges. University distance working management methods and approaches are considered, e.g. assessment, digital content production, synchronous and asynchronous interaction between the student and the teaching staff, as well as the experience and the results, that the university was able to achieve in these directions.

The complicated experience of 2020 shows, that global challenges can and will be beaten. With the retreat of the pandemic extreme measures like total distant learning may be cancelled, but many new practices will remain and bring education to a new level.

Keywords:

e-learning, distance learning technologies, Covid-19 pandemic, learning management system, scaling, load balancing, digital learning content production.