Educational Management of Foreign Students at the Higher Military School: An Ecosystem Approach

Abstract

The problems associated with the management of the educational process of students in a higher military school from the point of view of the ecosystem approach in pedagogical science and practice have not been previously studied. The ecosystem approach is considered by the authors as a new management paradigm for organizing the educational process, where one of the fundamental ideas is reliance on data from international educational and economic statistics (Education Index, Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment, Global Education Expenditure, Human Development Index). The purpose of the article is to form an idea of the management of an integral ecosystem in which foreign servicemen who study in Russian military educational organizations function. Research objectives were: substantiation of methodological approaches to the management of the educational process of foreign students in Russian military universities, ensuring the implementation of ecosystem methodology, integrated with thesaurus and praxeological approaches; the need to identify the structural components of the ecosystem (deterministic and variable); proof of the validity of the allocation of eco-segments in the integral ecosystem of a military university; determination of diagnostic parameters for the eco-segmentation of the integral ecosystem of a higher military educational institution that manages the process of training foreign military personnel. To solve the set tasks, V.A. Yasvin, adapted by the authors for the examination of eco-segments of a higher military educational institution, as well as the method of cluster analysis of data (K-means algorithm with normalized data) to prove the validity of the hypothesis put forward about the heterogeneity of the integral ecosystem of a military university and the need for its segmentation to improve the efficiency of management decisions. The result of the theoretical part of the research was the proof of the validity of the application of the ecosystem approach to the management of the educational process for foreign students in military educational institutions of Russia; the need for segmentation of an integral ecosystem based on the put forward characteristic parameters (breadth, intensity, awareness, etc.) in order to determine the subject composition of each eco-segment and estimate their total number for each new set of students. The study is focused on improving the quality of management of the educational process by adapting educational programs common for Russian and foreign students and variations of the didactic component of the ecosystem for each of the identified eco-segments.