Artificial intelligence (hereinafter referred to as AI) is currently an area of strategic importance and a key technology ensuring a new digital economy development in Russia. Qualified AI specialist's training plays an important role in achieving ambitious AI-related goals as stated in government documents. The article presents survey results of more than 200 Russian universities, which enabled to create indicators characterizing both current and planned training volumes of AI specialists.

According to the research results, Russian universities have responded quickly to the AI market development. Since 2019, they have been enrolling students at AI learning programs by intensifying training volumes annually. More than half of all AI learning programs are implemented within the «09.00.00 Informatics and Computer Science» and «01.00.00 Mathematics and Mechanics» majors/ specialties. AI specialist training in Russian universities is largely carried out at the expense of budgetary funds. The number of students enrolled at the AI learning programs is much higher for the bachelor programs.

The specialists’ graduation in AI-related education programs was evaluated until the year 2025. The authors have also analyzed the best foreign practice in AI specialists training and proposed some measures to increase training volumes of AI specialists at Russian universities, for example, re-orienting higher education programs in the IT field at AI-related technologies. It is important that AI learning programs take into account recruitment needs projection in terms of training volumes and skills profiles.

There are some serious issues with the recruitment and motivation of the faculty in the publicly-funded higher education of the Russian Federation. They are a significant reduction in the number of teaching staff, a substantial part of the old-age staff, an increase in the total workload and extracurricular work. The most important reason of the described problems is the issue of remuneration. In this regard, the purpose of the study is to suggest some directions for the development of the material remuneration systems for the employees in the publicly funded higher education. The methodological basis of the research are such methods as analysis and synthesis, as well as abstraction and a structurally systematic approach. As a result, it was determined that: 1) unreasonably low official salaries established by professional qualification groups do not provide the reproduction function of wages in full; 2) the differentiation of official salaries for the lecturers of the same qualification level and the position held, due to the size of the financing of budgetary institutions and the remuneration policy of the university, leads to a violation of the principle of “an equal pay for an equal work”; 3) the presence of a large number of incentive payments in the salary structure leads to the “opacity” of wages. The following recommendations are formulated: the salary structure considering the specifics of the publicly funded higher education is justified, methodological approaches to the structure of the official salaries, as well as the incentive and compensation payments are developed.

The ongoing transformations in the modern world have a significant impact on the sustainable development of national economies, unify the requirements for human capital, and its educational level. Taking into account current trends, governments are taking significant measures to ensure and maintain the link between education, the economy and socio-economic development. These measures also change approaches to engineering training. At the same time, training, retraining, continuing training of educators are of great importance. Educators at present should follow trends of a dynamically changing reality. Thus, the purpose of this work is to assess the educators’ readiness for innovative professional and pedagogical activities (IPPA) in the process of their training on the module “Problembased, practice-oriented, project-based learning”, which is part of the continuing retraining program for engineering teachers iPET-3, developed within the framework of the international project ENTER (“EngineeriNg educaTors pEdagogical tRaining”), co-funded by the Erasmus + program of the European Union. The article proposes a model for the development of educators’ readiness for IPPA within the framework of professional retraining programs, a methodology for assessing the component composition of IPPA, and a three-level characteristic model of the component composition of IPPA. The use of the developed model during continuing retraining programs increases the level of teachers’ creative abilities, the amount of acquired material and their pedagogical skills.

“Education 4.0” should be consistent with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The reforms of engineering education as its component require new competences of technical university teachers who are responsible for these reforms and as a result, trigger the improvement of further teachers’ professional development programs to train them for that. Such a program is also one of the aims of the project “Effective training model of technical discipline lecturers for the purpose of obtaining “International Educator of Engineering University” certificate – “ING-PAED IGIP”. It is realized by Moscow Automobile and Road Construction State Technical University (MADI) that was recognized as a Federal Innovative Platform in 2020.

The project is aimed at designing an additional program intended to develop technical university teachers’ competences that are, on the one hand, relevant to the needs of Russian higher school, and, on the other hand, correspond to the requirements for applying for the title «ING-PAED IGIP» of the International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP). In order to achieve that it is necessary to identify if technical university teachers’ competences that are relevant in Russia correspond the competences determined in IGIP.

In order to solve this problem, the authors undertook comparative analysis of the competencies registered in two documents: RF Professional Standard “Pedagogue of professional teaching, professional education and additional professional education” and the Fourth IGIP Prototype Curriculum.

The paper specifies the notion of technical university teacher competence for the research, validates the possibility of the two documents comparison, describes the procedure of comparative analysis on the basis of compiling summary tables.

The paper also gives the main conclusions of the comparative analysis. It proves that RF Professional Standard covers all the competences required by Fourth IGIP Prototype Curriculum. RF Professional Standard registers teachers’ actions more distinctly, consistently, and with more details. The research revealed the competences relevant for Russian higher education, but not necessary for IGIP. The research also allowed to formulate preliminary recommendations for designing additional teachers’ professional development program in the MADI project.

Due to the growing interest in artificial intelligence in recent years, teaching this discipline to students of applied technical specialties is becoming relevant. Despite the formation of this scientific direction for almost 70 years, there is still no clear understanding of the terminology of this science, its tasks at the present stage and its application in engineering education. Moreover, the artificial intelligence terminology often misleads students. The article examines the current situation with the development of ideas related artificial intelligence, the possibility of its using in engineering education. Based on the analysis of the real possibilities of artificial intelligence, the actual content of education in the discipline of “Artificial intelligence in transport construction” is determined. The article focuses on users of artificial intelligence, not developers. The authors consider the competencies of a specialist that can be formed during the study of the above indicated discipline, as well as new relevant competencies that are necessary for a specialist in connection with the wide dissemination of artificial intelligence in the conditions of his/her professional activity. The functional model of artificial intelligence used in teaching students how to interact with it is considered. The article gives the examples of tasks solved by students today with the help of artificial intelligence technology during trial training.

The relevance of the topic stems from the contradiction between the experience accumulated by higher school in adapting lecture as a form of organization of education to the new conditions of education functioning and the insufficient attention of researchers to analyzing this experience. The purpose of the study was to identify the role, place and directions of the lecture transformation in modern higher education. To achieve it, a meta-analysis of publications on the topic over the past ten years was carried out (2011–2021). In total, 52 scientific articles published in peer-reviewed leading domestic pedagogical journals and other scientific and methodological publications were analyzed. The selection of articles for analysis was carried out by the presence of the keyword “lecture” in the article title.

The results of the study show that despite the wide variety and general availability of information and communication sources the lecture cannot be supplanted in the system of higher education, but new demands have been placed on it, as its role in the system of higher education changes. The authors have identified the main requirements for a modern lecture, namely problem setting, structure flexibility, focus on dialogic forms of communication with students, effective feedback. The leading trend in the development of lectures in a modern university is a combination of scientific character, information value and high professionalism inherited from traditional lectures with dialogue and a variety of lecture types, an increase in interactivity to enhance the educational and communication activities of students. It has been established that the transformation of a lecture in modern higher education goes in the following directions: organizational-content, functional-structural, and communication. The authors dwell on the content of each direction and propose prospective areas for further research.

With the inflow of the new generations of students, university teachers in social sciences and humanities have been challenged by a crisis of textual culture given the students tend to increasingly avoid reading complicated academic texts. In these circumstances, traditional arrangements of seminars and students’ homework are becoming less effective. This paper is aimed at exploring the new capacities for coping with the new critical situation. We address the issue of why we should keep the practices of active reading and how examination of complicated academic texts contribute to the formation of the students’ critical thinking. Both the special literature and personal teaching experience of the author are attracted. Traditional forms of teaching arrangements are analyzed. Then we use an experience of a digital platform to demonstrate the potential ways of resolving the teaching problems. They include active reading dealing with the reflexive work, interactive discussions in the class and in the virtual environment. We also show that additional efforts associated with the use of digital technologies pay back enabling the teacher to control the students’ homework more effectively and provide a more adequate assessment of the educational outcomes.

Language environment is now being created and cultivated in most Russian universities. However, as a concept it has been defined quite fragmentary, and in many cases is completely ignored as something obvious and self-evident. In this paper, we conduct a literature review of most typical definitions of this phenomenon and identify a set of features underlying its understanding. We then propose a more precise definition of language environment and highlight the basic principles that contribute to its effective functioning and ensure the linguistic socialization of an individual. We suggest that our “definition-assumption” and the minimum set of principles should be at the core of university measures towards creating a foreign language environment.

The paper raises the issue of the relevance of creating generalized syllabi for each enlarged group of majors, when teaching linguistic disciplines of compulsory and optional parts of the curriculum related to the subject area «Foreign Language». The authors show the need for generalized syllabi as being grounded by existing controversies in modern foreign language training. The paper suggests a concept that substantiates the demand for targeted generalized syllabi for this discipline and contains a number of principles, which can help to design their optimal content. The notions of «zones of near and further content and competence integration» are introduced. The content of these zones is revealed, and their role in modelling the key components of generalized syllabi is shown. Integrated foreign language professional communicative competence of an engineering graduate is introduced as a prospective model of foreign language competence. It is regarded as an integrative notion combining traditional components of communicative competence with professional knowledge, skills and experience involved in the process of mastering cross-cultural professional communication. The realization of the concept principles in the content of generalized syllabi aims at the reflection of university graduates’ real foreign language communication needs in their professional activity in learning outcomes in accordance with the FSES HE 3 ++. The authors express certainty that the concept of generalized syllabi will allow to initiate the process of their creation and will become a stimulus to the development of foreign language teaching methodology in a non-linguistics university.

The issues of physiological and mental health of young people have always remained in the focus of researchers’ attention, however, there are practically no works where the “healthy personality” is considered more broadly, including the features of its functioning in a social context. The authors propose the concept of a “healthy personality”, which includes the following components: emotional stability and psychological well-being, a low degree of suggestibility and adherence to the values of goodness and security. These components meet the challenges of the modern world and underlie the ability of a student’s personality to withstand the challenges of extremism. A combination of techniques was used to create the concept: 1) “General Health Questionnaire” by Goldberg, 2) Schwartz Questionnaire and 3) “Suggestibility Test” by S.V. Klauchek and V.V. Delaryu. With the help of tools that include these methods and thematic blocks (attitudes towards the media, extremism, civic and political position), a questionnaire survey was conducted on a sample of 1,500 people representing the Russian students of three Moscow universities – RUDN University, Moscow State University and National Research University Higher School of Economics in terms of courses and areas of study.

The purpose of the article is to develop a research concept of “healthy personality” based on a combination of existing methods used to measure conformity, psychological stability and emotional well-being and value orientations. As a result, the level of emotional stability and psychological wellbeing of Moscow students, the type of value orientations, and their level of conformity are revealed. The dominant personality type, calculated on the basis of the results of the methods, turned out to be “relatively healthy personality” (67.6%), one fifth of the respondents were classified as “healthy personality”, however, every tenth student is a “personality at risk”. The proposed concept can be used during sociological monitoring of educational services of the university in order to diagnose risk groups among first-year students.