Abstract:

Pandemic experience with the urgent widespread introduction of online technologies shows that schools and universities have not yet moved to a whole new level of operating. In fact, a full-fledged "digitalization" of the educational environment, the transition to the next "educational era" cannot be introduced, for example, only by the fact that the teacher does not check a paper notebook, but a photograph of the work written in this notebook, or that the teacher uploads a printed lecture to the Internet, instead of reading it to the audience. Digital transformation of education is the renewal of both the planned educational results, and the content of education, as well as the teaching methods and assessment of the academic work of each student.

The experience of a wide-spread distant learning during the 2020 pandemic reveals that all interacting components of the educational process are not always taken into account. Thus, in the current Federal State Educational Standard, the requirement for students to master the ability to study independently is stated as one of the most important results of educational work, but the distribution of responsibility for its individual components between potential performers (teachers, mentors, educators or parents) and the performance indicators of their work are not clearly defined. Moreover, there are no even attempts to develop procedures that will assess whether students have developed any ability to study. So, the work on mastering the ability to study independently claimed in the Standard and which is crucially important for a new digital era has not been performed in terms of its management which to some extent became a painful point in the situation of remote learning.

Digital technologies and the ability to use them are not sufficient for the digital transformation of education to take place in full swing. As international experience shows, the transition from cases of occasional success in using digital technologies to improving the work of mass education is impossible without systemic changes which require the involvement of all school staff, students, parents and other stakeholders. Pedagogical work of enormous amount and complexity is required to transfer the educational organization to an innovative mode [Uvarov, 2013]. This work can be divided into three main interconnected groups: development of education digital infrastructure; development of digital teaching materials, tools and services; development and distribution of new models for educational and academic work.

According to experts in innovative pedagogy, educational institutions in the process of digital transformation have to amend (renovate) their aims and content of their educational work; move from teaching and educating all students together to teaching and educating every student individually, changing the organization and methods of educational work; revise and optimize the sets (collections) of educational, methodological and organizational solutions, information materials, tools and services which have been used; revise traditional business processes, involving in this work all stakeholders (first of all, students and teachers); use all the possibilities of modern digital technologies (DT) for the mechanization and automation of all types of work with information.

The authors describe the advantages and challenges of the digital transformation of education. They emphasize the need to update the goals, content, organization and methods of educational work, optimize educational, methodological and organizational solutions, clarify source materials, tools and services.

Keywords:

Distance learning, online education, transformation of modern education, educational Environment.