Abstract. Relevance. The article provides an overview and analysis of the consequences of changes in the global educational space during the period of action of measures to counter the spread of the new COVID-19 coronavirus infection.

The aim of the work was to understand the current state and identify possible trajectories of development

of educational systems in the “post-pandemic” era. Research methodology and methods. The main methods used in the preparation of the work were methods of analysis and synthesis. The review and understanding of various standpoints on the educational organizations functioning in the situation of emergency introduction of quarantine measures and the uncertainty of their consequences allowed us to summarize the main challenges facing the education system today. The forecasting method was used to systematize the capabilities of universities in overcoming crisis phenomena and determine the strengths that can be used as the basis for the transformation of University management.

Results. The analysis of the trajectories of the prospective organization of the educational process at the University of “post-pandemic” time is carried out. The article highlights the main ways of the educational system adaptation to work in the conditions of an unpredictable crisis consequences and presents the authors’ vision of the future of higher education in Russia, which is inextricably linked with the country’s attractiveness in the global educational space.

Scientific novelty. The authors systematize the impact of the pandemic on various sectors of the economy, including the education sector. The results of the analysis of the practical experience of educational systems in  the new conditions are presented. Scenarios of educational organizations development in an unfavorable dynamic uncertain environment are shown.

Practical significance. The results obtained will be useful in adjusting University management systems and developing strategies for universities to overcome the crisis caused by COVID-19 and its consequences.

The project called “5-100” has been established in Russia in 2013 for the period of time from 2013 up to 2020. It was supposed that this project would be resulted in entry of 5 Russian universities into 100 highest positions of the world university ratings. 21 Russian universities were chosen as the participants of the project. To achieve the purpose of the project, every chosen university received considerable financial support from the Russian federal government. Among others, two universities from the city of Tomsk – Tomsk State University (TSU) and Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) were the participants of this project. In spite of the identical starting points, the universities have demonstrated substantially different results by the end of the project implementation. In this article, we attempted to explain the difference of the results through difference of the corporate cultures of both universities. The corporate culture study has been done using OCAI method. The study showed that TGU’s corporate culture looks like more competitive than TPU’s one. It was proved by the comparison of the TPU and TGU cultures with cultures of the foreign universities.

Harmonization of Postgraduate Training System with the Certification of Candidates of Sciences The activities of the postgraduate school and the network of dissertation councils represent the stages of the trajectory of the formation of a researcher with an academic degree. This means that their activities should be coordinated. The article discusses several approaches to the harmonization: at the level of each organization – by the presence or absence of one of the participants in the trajectory, and at the thematic level. For each approach, statistical estimates of consistency are calculated, and cartographic representations of indicators in the context of the subjects of the federation are given. The analysis showed that, in general, there is a territorial alignment of the organizations for postgraduate student training with the organizations in which a candidate’s thesis can be defended.

The formation and development of network capital in the university brings up the issue of its influence on characteristics of the city’s social capital. The basic provisions of the network approach and the theory of social capital are used as theoretical grounds to identify such an impact. The article reveals the features of a modern university as a complex network object and the characteristics of interpersonal relationships that arise in its socio-cultural environment. These include the cultural homogeneity, formation of a joint reality, optimization of communication processes, the need for cooperation. Taking into account the revealed specificity, the network capital available to the subjects of social interaction is characterized and studied through the categories of trust and solidarity. It is determined that trust and solidarity are not only central, but necessary structural elements of the university’s network capital, first of all, because the peculiarities of the organization of network interaction dictate the preferred strategies of network behavior, into which these phenomena are embedded. Thus, being the holder of intellectual resources and a network of interpersonal connections, the university produces the effective ways to expand the city’s social capital, firstly, through a unique social network organization capable of rapid mobilization. It provides access to the formation of temporary teams with deep and versatile competencies that generate “quick trust”. Secondly, it expands the city’s social capital through impersonal trust, which convinces society that the university has some universal competence related to the life of the city and its people.

The authors view the of the university as a system of values that is logically connected with the nature of knowledge as the subject, goal, and highest value of the university’s main scientific and educational activities. The key criterion of knowledge is the evidential validity. The article reveals its meaning from the position of Russian intuitionism, which combines the method of reflexive analysis with the tradition of ontological proof. The authors treat the meaning of absolute truth intuition as the basis of the value function of knowledge in relation to university education. In accordance with the essential orientation of universities to the reproduction of knowledge, that is the unconditional public good, they are qualified as missiotropic organizations. The University’s missiotropic axiologic is justified as a humanistic alternative to the capitalist ideal of global social harmony. Based on the methodological potential of the fundamental motivational matrix (FMM), the caste attributes of the latter are revealed. The specific nature of the appeal to moral responsibility in the context of corporate governance is revealed; the tendency to legalize ethical responsibility in connection with its instrumental understanding in the context of global market competition is noted.

The article analyzes the draft order of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia «On the approval of the list of specialties and areas of training for higher education» for the names of qualifications given in the list of specialties and areas of training for higher education. The author proposes to unify the names of qualifications assigned after the completion of postgraduate studies; proposals for qualifications are also given after the completion of specialty programs.

Ensuring the competitiveness of pedagogical universities and their graduates is one of the strategic tasks in the field of education and the country’s economy. Its achievement requires orientation of the basic educational programs and technologies for their implementation to the needs of the modern school. This necessitates a rethinking of approaches to organizing the training of future teachers, strengthening its practical orientation by expanding the area of responsibility of direct employers. The central issue of the article is the role and directions of implementing partnerships between the employer and the pedagogical university in preparing future teachers in the current educational situation. The purpose of this article is to identify promising areas of its development on the basis of an analysis of the existing regional experience in the training of teachers based on the implementation of social and professional partnerships. The study of the role and directions of the implementation of partnerships between the employer and the pedagogical university in the preparation of modern graduates – future teachers was carried out on the basis of the application of theoretical and empirical research methods. An analysis of the role of the employer in the training process was carried out on the basis of questionnaires and expert interviews. The main material was the pedagogical experience of teachers of the Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of KSPU named after V.P. Astafiev, and employers – directors of educational institutions of secondary education of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the Republic of Khakassia, as well as the results of a study of the problems of training future teachers. Based on empirical data, the article concludes that social and professional partnerships are a necessary part of the training of future teachers in accordance with modern requirements and standards. The role and directions of implementing partnerships between employers and a pedagogical university in the preparation of future teachers are detailed. The practical significance lies in the use of the results obtained in the system of higher pedagogical education in order to ensure high-quality training of graduates.

Digitalization of business and society inevitably affects almost all spheres, and education is not an exception. New high-tech tools and solutions are rapidly coming into this industry, without which further development and implementation of the educational process is no longer possible. Today target audience of any educational organizations is informationally advanced and prefers to source useful information from social networks, often making business decisions based on it. Such conditions put forward new requirements for educational organizations to increase their activity in social networks and, above all, to form a digital image. Professors are the face of any educational organization. Inasmuch as they are the subjects who directly interact with students, their personal digital image plays an important role in shaping corporate image of the university. Relevance of this article is in the research of the digital image process formation by professors of business universities, which are the flagships and market-oriented subjects of local higher education.

The article aims to identify the current state of forming the digital image of teachers of entrepreneurial universities in social networks. To achieve the goal, the article discusses the features of an entrepreneurial university and the characteristics of its corporate image, shows the need to form a teacher’s digital image and identifies strategies for such formation in social networks. The study of the activity of Russian entrepreneurial universities’ teachers in social networks was carried out and the comparison of the results with the similar activity of foreign universities’ teachers was made.

The article describes the practical implementation of an experimental model for teaching academic writing to non-linguistic students of humanities at three levels of higher education. Improving the quality of domestic scientific publications submitted to high-ranking journals requires new effective pedagogical technologies. Theory and methodology analysis, as well as empirical observations show that the problems faced by Russian-speaking authors of academic texts can be divided into two categories: strong Russian accent that creates the language barrier and hinders understanding, and flawed academic style that leads to the cross-cultural academic barrier. The described ten-year study involved 25 students of Petrozavodsk State University, aged 17 to 28, who subsequently completed bachelor’s, master’s and postgraduate programs. At each of the three stages, the participants completed a set of tasks aimed at consistent and systematic formation of academic writing competence through writing abstracts (bachelors), conference proceedings (master’s students) and full-text academic articles (postgraduate students). To collect and process the data, the researchers used an open-ended questionnaire, the observation method, expert assessment, and descriptive statistics. The study results showed that the systematic approach helps to effectively eliminate structural and stylistic writing problems over the course of studies. However, the difficulties associated with the manifestation of the Russian accent in written English-language academic discourse are more resistant. The authors make the conclusion that the systematic development of academic writing skills in English will help to overcome obstacles for the internationalization of Russian science.

Global tendencies in all scientific spheres require developed academic literacy of the researcher for effective international communication. Foreign language communication in a professional academic environment implies proficiency in the language of academic discourse. For academic discourse, as a component of academic literacy, development of academic writing skills is crucial. Higher educational institutions realize the necessity to design academic writing courses, and determine their place in the curriculum. Following the challenges of the time and academic community demands, SSTU English Language instructors designed an academic writing course to increase the methodological and academic literacy of students and young researchers. We believe that the development of the key educational and communicative foreign language competencies for academic and professional interaction can contribute to successful integration into the international scientific environment. Course design considered foreign experience, methods and curricula in the field of academic writing and academic reading.

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.

The article examines the processes of internationalization, provides information on the number of foreign students in various countries and in Russia, discusses the arguments for choosing the country for study by international students, including socio-cultural and linguistic preferences. The authors address the issues relating to the status of the Russian language in countries of the Central Asia region – the former republics of the Soviet Union. The article provides an information on the expansion of Western and Eastern countries into the educational system of these countries. The conclusion is made about the need for Russian universities to more actively enter the international market of educational services, especially in those areas where the Russian Federation has undeniable achievements (natural science fields of training, etc.).

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.

The authors propose a model of pre-master foreign students’ training, based on the formation of professional and language competence of foreign pre-master students during their studies at pre-university courses, and also consider pedagogical technologies of its implementation. Entering the pre-university courses, pre-graduate students have some skills in self-directed scientific research, but they cannot write in a non-native language, read professional literature, create their own scientific text and formalize a statement and present it. The authors propose a specific learning strategy that helps pre-graduate students to acquire oral and written language skills, produce a full monological scientific statement in Russian, get the initial skills in academic writing.

Pre-Master’s training of foreign students is characterized by an individual approach to future undergraduates. Developing the strategy aimed at the achievement of the professional and language competences by foreign pre-graduates, the authors implement various learning methods, such as a personality-oriented method, grammar-translation method, communicative method of teaching and a project method. The article sums up the initial monitoring results of the program implementation at pre-university courses of Volgograd State Technical University and formulates the proposals for its further development. Strategic planning of teaching Russian in this direction allows us to rely on the fact that a foreign scientist would be able to solve specific communicative tasks in a non-native language in an academic and professional environment.