Problems of Teaching Foreign Students under Conditions of the Pandemic

The article analyzes a process of teaching foreign students at regional universities under conditions of restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, using digital technologies. Currently, universities, and especially technical universities, play a leading role in the development and distribution of digital technologies. The authors believe that achieving these goals involves changing the content of academic disciplines and courses, including those aimed at improving digital literacy. The concept of combining a lecture system and e-learning technologies, which are provided by the electronic platform Microsoft Teams at the VSTU, is a modern format of the educational process. With a mixed format of educational process, the modular principle of organizing a curriculum of disciplines seems to be more appropriate. The authors analyze the results of the first stage of educational digitalization (the second semester of the 2019/20 academic year). This analysis is based on the academic performance of students (Russian and foreign) and the results of teachers’ and students’ survey on the effectiveness of distance learning. According to the results of educational analytics, the authors state, firstly, a decrease in the absolute academic performance of students while teaching with a help of the distance education technologies and e-learning, due to the low level of students’ self-organization and the lack of educational material in the digital format; secondly, a decrease in the quality of teaching, which demonstrates the unwillingness of teachers to use the potential of e-learning and, thirdly, the impossibility of a complete transfer of teaching to a digital environment. In addition, the authors describe the problems faced by regional universities in the process of educational digitalization and the implementation of the program of Russian education export

Student Mobility as a Form of Education Internationalization: A Systems Approach to Management

According to the analysis of the existing internationalization strategies it is demonstrated that its main source is an international students’ mobility, which is based on ability, willingness and common interest in cooperation of three following subjects: countries importing education, education-exporting countries, higher educational institution of the exporting country, which provides its educational services for the citizens of the country importing education. The success of this process depends on a certain set of factor indicators in politics, economics, sociology and technology, which are peculiar to each of three participants. The authors propose common to all the participants list of criteria, which evaluate indicators of the stated factors according to the integrated scale: political (administrative) stability, degree of participants’ cooperation, legislation in educational sphere, mutual amiability of the subjects, level of administrative barriers, peculiarities of demographic situation, economic performance, demand for majors of training, logistic accessibility, the number of graduate students, language attraction of training programs, level of career-oriented activities, correspondence between the level of applicants’ acquirements and requirements of the education-exporting country, competition on the educational services market, accessibility of distance educational technologies, development level and dynamics of innovations. The article gives an integral estimation of the efficiency forecast for the work of exporting higher educational institution with the population of a particular education-importing country. This estimation is carried out by means of the analysis of the formed multi-level hierarchical structure. The convolution of hierarchical elements on each level of the hierarchical structure is done using a generalised f-mean, proposed by Kolmogorov – Nagumo. There are given examples of the proposed methodology implication for quantitative and comparative assessment of the potential of education-importing countries. Due to this, international services of the university determine the most attractive countries in terms of international students’ mobility organization and therefore concentration of administrative and financial resources in the chosen direction, in order to make decision on the university brand promotion on the foreign market of educational services. The model can be easily modified by adding the relevant or excluding irrelevant parameters for a given university