Rubrics have been developed to evaluate the level of compliance of curriculum elements with the recommendations of the CDIO-FCDI-FFCD Standards in the process of modernizing engineering programs for undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate studies. As an example, the author presents the results of the evaluation of engineering undergraduate program courses for compliance with the recommendations of the CDIO Standards in the form of total and differentiated ratings of the modules of the humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics, basic engineering and specialized professional courses. Based on the ratings, the initial (before modernization) and planned (after modernization) levels of compliance of the program modules with the recommendations of each of the 12 CDIO Standards are determined. Using the rubrics enables to involve all the instructors in the process of engineering program modernization.

The article examines two ways to achieve mastery of undergraduate mathematics: face-to- face and digital learning formats. The authors have developed and tested a unique interactive computer-based learning software – few local programs to practice math online, offline or to be installed into an e-course. We focus on different standard problems, such as, finding determinants, solving differential equations, integration by parts, etc. The aim of this study was to investigate what kinds of the activities lead to good learning outcomes. To date, much of the previous research has suggested that students get the benefits of e-learning and b-learning. Yet, there is a general lack of research on outcomes compares the different ways in which students gain knowledge. The results show that the interactive math simulator is one of the effective tools for developing skills to solve standard problems of higher mathematics. There are, however, some math problems to be learn traditionally, with textbook and chalkboard.

The article discusses the creation of professionally-oriented foreign language textbooks in the process of interaction between the department of foreign languages and the specialized departments of a technical university. Inter-departmental cooperation is considered as a university resource for improving the quality of higher education; examples of successful interdepartmental cooperation at the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University are given. It is shown that a characteristic feature of a professionally-oriented textbook of the new generation, created by the joint efforts of the linguistic and specialized departments is the widespread use of the elements of the computer-based learning environment, which contributes to a more effective mastering of the subject content. A list of seven English language textbooks created as a result of inter-departmental cooperation, and a brief analysis of the problems that arose in the process of communication between specialists of linguistic and technical profiles are presented. It is shown that the process of creating foreign language textbooks can be simultaneously used as a practice-oriented interdisciplinary project for master degree students of a linguistic profile who participate in it as developers of the linguistic content of these textbooks. Participation of the postgraduates in this project is supported by the curricular discipline “Interdisciplinary links in higher education” and teaching practice.

The article was prepared on the basis of an international comparative study – a sociological survey of students from regional universities from 37 cities in the Sverdlovsk region of the Russian Federation and 20 settlements of the Shirak region in the Republic of Armenia (targeted sample, No. = 715). The authors explore the potential for social participation of students from countries with a common political background of post-socialism and cardinal differences in the cultural and historical heritage of urban spaces.

The purpose of this article is to determine the potential for social participation of students of regional universities in Russia and Armenia and the subjective factors that determine their activity in the development of cities. The article analyzes the experience of volunteering, as well as the willingness of students to different types of constructive social participation in urban development. To identify factors that activate the social participation of students, a discriminant analysis has been used. Discriminant models were constructed dividing groups of students from different countries with a high and low degree of readiness for social participation, as well as into groups with and without volunteering experience. The authors argue that Russia and Armenia are characterized by an identical structure of student involvement in volunteer activities, but the level of students’ readiness for social participation in urban development in the countries under consideration is different. For Armenian students, not only the willingness for social participation is higher, but also the practices themselves are more associated with active socio-cultural activities in the urban space. Two factors that determine the experience of real participation in the socio-cultural development of cities are characteristic of both Russian and Armenian students. The real experience of volunteering is more likely to be acquired by those students who are motivated to receive information about the culture and history of their cities, as well as the ability to see and identify significant cultural and historical objects where they live and study. In the Russian scenario, the importance of the city, the need for its development increases for students if they, being armed with certain knowledge about its culture and history, consider that the city is an interesting object (including a tourist one) for promotion. For Armenian students, knowledge of the culture and history of their place of birth is a basic factor that shapes their interest in further exploring their cities, the desire to make them better.

The article focuses on the problems of the implementation of the educational process in the University, taking into account the interests and needs of employers in the context of the transition of Russian higher education to the updated educational standards designed to take into account the requirements of applicable professional standards. The reasons of emergence of a situation, when a young specialist, sharply focused on the needs of a particular employer is unable to solve professional problems in conditions of other industrial sites and laboratories. The authors demonstrate the negative effects of the so-called «in-depth professionalization» and isolation of graduates from the competition held by the University in the interests of the particular employer. The article dwells on the preventive measures to eliminate these phenomena in the framework of «university – employer » cooperation, taking into account the individual interests of the student who is originally a full stakeholder of educational process. The term «customization» derived from marketing means fine tuning of graduates according to the specific requirements of a particular employer. The article provides a critical analysis of customization with regard to the Russian higher education in the historical aspect. The authors substantiate the need of complex customization of graduates, which implies that all University partners and stakeholders should be involved in educational process. Such complex customization may engage regional resource centers, centers of competence, centers of excellence and centers of engineering which are free from corporate interests.

The article analyzes current trends in the study of corruption in the higher education system in Russia and Western countries. Classifications of corruption abuse, the structure of corruption indicators in universities, problems of studying attitudes towards corruption in the higher education system and the reflection of abuse in the media are discussed. The results of a survey of graduates of seven leading Russian universities for the period from September 2019 to January 30, 2020 are presented. Using the authors’ questionnaire, 1,468 graduates of 2013 and 2018 were interviewed. An additional task was also performed to compare anti-corruption materials on the websites of seven leading Russian universities. The results of the survey indicate the positive dynamics of students’ perceptions of corruption offenses in the direction of decreasing their frequency, which, along with site analysis data, indicates a systematic work that has been carried out in each of the universities over the past years. The authors note the need for greater awareness among university students and teachers about the various situations of corruption, as well as the creation of a feedback about the possible cases of abuse in the university environment that is safe for an applicant.

The purpose of this article is to study the dynamics of some market indicators for “paid” publications. The authors analyze scientific articles, data from Google Trends on requests characterizing the dynamics of the market, data from student journals published by top sites offering paid publishing services. The main research method is content analysis of data using automated tools of the MS Office suite and the VBA environment. The authors note that supply and demand in the “paid” publications market are formed under the influence of state policy in the field of university ranking, stimulating scientists and students. According to the data regarding inquiries over 5 years, there has been a positive trend. The popularity of the «RSI publication» request has grown by 300% since January 1, 2017. The authors also show an increase in the selected student journals. The authors note the steady growth of the market for “paid” publications and point out that a number of measures applied do not work or may even adversely affect the development of Russian science. The authors discuss possible measures to remedy the situation, agreeing with the position of some scientists and objecting to others.

This paper reveals the importance of overcoming writer’s block for university researchers as second language writers. The idea and materials for the paper come from the experience of the Center for Academic Writing “Impulse” at the University of Tyumen, Russia. The target audience of the Center is the university faculty and researchers who have a lack of time to immerse in the writing process, rather they mainly want to obtain an immediate tangible result. However, our research shows that they often get frustrated by their inability to complete their writing piece because they get stuck at different stages of the writing process. For example, some people find it difficult to finish their papers, or others fade away in the middle, but the main problem is to start writing. Thus, they face writer’s block which can be referred to moderate blockage. To overcome the block, we offer the researchers a variety of activities during courses and special projects. This paper describes two strategies: classroom intervention including mainly pre-writing activities, such as freewriting, looping, word association, aimed to overcome the fear of a white page, and individualized intervention based on the project entitled “Drop in & Reboot your Writing”. The project comprised 10-20 weekly individual meetings lasting for 30 minutes and aiming at dealing with a particular writing issue. The individual approach to each participant led to a better understanding of the causes of writer’s block and finding the cures. These strategies aim to develop researchers’ positive attitude to writing, to enable them to boost their awareness of the writing process in receiving the desired results, and build confidence as second language writers.

Writing academic texts in English introduces certain difficulties associated with translating Russian sentences with pronounced stylistic peculiarities, especially for young researchers who are just starting their publication activity. It seems impossible to study any genre without analysing examples of the discourse, which highlights the use of computational linguistics as it allows automating a lot of language and text processing mechanisms and generates relatively accurate quantitative results. The present study considers the application of AntConc and Coh-Metrix toolkits for analyzing master students’ abstracts to research papers written for international English-language journals or conference proceedings (Learner Corpus) in comparison with international researchers’ abstracts published in high-impact journals (Reference Corpus). The analysis conducted in the above-mentioned software tools revealed the drawbacks and strengths of master students’ texts, allowed characterizing them on the words, sentence and discourse levels, as well as outlined the potentials of their use in teaching academic writing skills.

The article considers network interaction of Russian universities to solve strategic problems of macroregions development. Network interaction is a common model of cooperation between universities abroad, and in recent years, in connection with the new challenges facing Russian education, it has become relevant for Russian universities. The article briefly presents the main forms of organization and methods of managing network interaction, its advantages over traditional types of joint activities of universities. Based on the four years of work in the framework of the Association “National Arctic Research and Education Consortium” (NAREC), the authors analyze the experience of cooperation between universities in the interests of the development of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation. Four key areas of activity are considered: 1) expert and analytical support of personnel training and research; 2) Arctic-focused educational programs and projects; 3) support and promotion of scientific research on Arctic topics among students; 4) creation of joint information space. The article demonstrates the significant results of their implementation for each of these directions. These include monitoring the state of training of personnel with higher education and developing professional standards, developing educational products, including network programs and mass open online courses on Arctic topics, participating in international projects, conducting a national competition for student papers, as well as accumulating information related to training and research on Arctic topics. Based on the best practices of the Association “NAREC” and the difficulties encountered in the implementation of the network interaction model, the authors formulated practical recommendations for the development of interregional scientific and educational cooperation.

Infographics as a young science of converting massive volumes of knowledge into concise emergent visualizations, i.e. the methodology that works with transcoded knowledge, has become capable, at the digital stage of its own evolution, to integrate the most diverse fields of knowledge. This is possible due to the advantages that the graphic language provides along with all other ways of expressing and formalizing knowledge. The potentials of infographics for the university environment provide an opportunity to visually operate with vast volumes of knowledge, to search for new interdisciplinary nexus-points and heuristic intersections in the network structure of university science. Along the way, the problems of inventive tasks and the promotion of scientific knowledge are solved through digital infographic visualizations on the Internet, within and between universities. The article develops an idea of socio-epistemological and interdisciplinary potentials of the phenomenon of scientific and philosophical infographics for the sustainable growth of the competitive advantages of the Russian education system. The authors analyze the world and domestic experience in infographics functioning in science, business, management and consider a new project for a domestic university education on creating a knowledge visualization center on the example of a particular university. The authors give the examples of successful international data visualization projects and pay particular attention to the creation of a holistic interdisciplinary catalog of infographics. University digital library can serve as a source of databases and potentials of the visualization center, as a tool for visualizing this data. The authors discuss the possibility of infographic expertise procedure formation as a new methodology for analyzing and improving various program documents, social development programs, business projects, and dissertations. The article makes the case for developing infographic competencies of innovation actors in education, business and public administration.

In the context of global competition, Russian universities search for the most efficient solutions to achieve competitiveness in the global market. The particular challenges that Russian universities face today include enhancing the quality of education and research, development of export potential, integration into international academic environment, diversification and search for new financial sources. The article considers international project activity as the most efficient tool of university internationalization process and solving the university tasks. Fundraising and international projects provide substantial support for achieving the set objectives in terms of both allocating additional financial resources and attracting intellectual capacity of international partners. Due to such features as practice orientation, time limits, and the ability to integrate different types and forms of international cooperation, the projects help university to address the challenges in a complex way and achieve multiple effects and, therefore, contribute significantly to developing world-demanded research, creating scholars networks and publishing, strengthening international partnerships, capacity building, enhancing academic mobility, developing the university campus and its infrastructure. The authors present the management model of international fundraising and projects implementation at Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M. Lomonosov, describe specific features of carrying out research and educational projects in cross-cultural context (also within the framework of cross-border cooperation in Barents Euro-Arctic Region). The article outlines the competences required for successful project implementation, gives examples of NArFU international projects aimed at solving challenges in the Arctic Region. The efficiency of the given management model is analyzed, also by presenting the results of sociological survey made with involvement of the projects participants.

In the conditions of robotization and automation of journalistic activities, journalists need to develop professional competencies that will allow them to perform the tasks of complex individual and collective creative activity, namely, authoring and editing. A modern journalist is primarily an author, a creator of meanings and values, and only then a relay of information. Changes in working conditions and the profession affect the understanding of oneself, a specialist has to rediscover the image of himself in the profession and the image of the profession itself, which is the core of professional identity. Modern universities are looking for innovative models of training journalists. One of such innovative educational systems can be so called liberal education. In Russian universities, journalism education according to the principles of the liberal education system is organized at the RANEPA, Novosibirsk State University, Tyumen State University, NArFU named after M.V. Lomonosov. However, there is a lack of research on the topic of the effectiveness of liberal education in the context of the formation of professional identity. The article discusses the results of using methodologies from the liberal education system to develop professional identity at the university for students in the direction 42.03.02 “Journalism” in the disciplines “Introduction to World Journalism”, “History of Foreign Journalism”, “History of Foreign Journalism: XX Century” and “International Journalism”. The goal was the introduction of liberal education techniques, namely, analytical writing, in-depth, slow reading and joint work on media projects, which contribute to the formation of professional identity of future journalists who are ready to work in the new conditions of a digital society. The author analyzes her own experience in using the above methods. As the main research method, a content analysis of student activity products is used.

The purpose of the article is to actualize the problems of personality values and senses in university teachers’ professional activities. The authors present and substantiate the methodology for identifying the relation between personal significance for teachers of various aspects of their professional activities and time costs for the implementation of these aspects (components). The methodology is based on their pairwise comparison. This comparison is carried out first by the criterion of the significance of these aspects, and after 1-2 weeks – by the criterion of their time cost. Based on their own work as well as other studies, the authors identify three of the most timeconsuming aspects of teachers’ activity: the preparation and conducting of lessons and lectures; scientific products creation; work with documents. It is confirmed that the preparation and conducting of lessons and lectures as well as the preparation of various plans, programs, reports, etc. are the dominant components of university teachers’ activity. The disparity between the personal significance and time costs is the smallest if it concerns preparation of lessons. In this case, the time cost is compensated by understanding of its importance. As for work with documents, such compensation does not exist here. So, it turns into a potential source of internal tensions and conflicts. The component “creation of scientific products” is quite contradictory: time costs for it subjectively seem quite large while this component is perceived as not high significant. This is consistent with other studies that show that this aspect of activity often turns out to be formally motivated, not related to serious scientific research. In the article, the situation, empirically recognized by many authors, gets a fundamentally new interpretation, as the temporal parameter acquires the status of value. The authors propose to consider time costs in relation to various aspects of university teachers’ activities in this particular context.

The paper considers the problem of changing the traditional model of higher education into the up-dated model of blended learning. The paper focuses on the problem of changing the teaching/learning strategies as the necessary condition for creating and improving the modified educational environment at Universities taking into consideration the advanced achievements in science and social development. The article dwells on the existing possibilities for a student-centered teaching/learning process where the student creates his individual educational track. The authors have considered the reimagining means of teaching/learning strategies for teaching staff by aiming at effective blended learning. Having analyzed the results of pilot studies, shortcomings of conventional teaching and statistical information on graduate employment, the authors have stated the fact that neither conventional teaching nor the so-called innovative educational technologies could close the gap between educational aims and results. The acute shortage of up-dated theoretical psychological and peda gogical knowledge as well as the lack of due consideration for reimagining of teaching/learning strategies have been suggested as the deep-rooted causes of this gap. The paper suggests the definition of teaching/learning strategies and the developed model of their application for University educational environment. The authors have shown the existed blended learning models and the experience of their implementation in the Russian Federation and abroad. The role of educational moderator at creating a new type of teaching/learning interaction by using a Tutorial FL Navigator has been justified and illustrated by FLT at University. The student turns into a member of academic community while entering the environment of Content and Language Integrated Learning Project (CLILP). The potential prospects of blended learning model have been analyzed using the project method in teaching foreign languages (Content and Language Integrated Learning Project). The conclusion of blended learning effectiveness for transformation the general foreign language teaching into expanded professional education has been drawn on the base of obtained empiric and statistical evidence.