The digital university is a solution for the sustainable functioning and developing of higher education institutions in war and post-war times

Abstract

Digital transformation of the higher education is one of the priority directions, which has a significant impact on improving the quality of providing educational services, as well as fulfilling the tasks of organizational management of educational institutions. The advantages provided by digitalization encourage various institutions to find their own private solutions for «building a digital university», to introduce information technologies into the educational process, to improve teaching methods and techniques using digital solutions. However, till present, there are no general approaches to the digital transformation of higher education institutions that could be applied as a unified solution that meets the existing requirements for training highly qualified specialists for the labor market. The aim of the work is to develop a general approach to building a «digital university» as an ecosystem of digital solutions (services) that cover all areas of activity of modern higher education institutions (educational, scientific, organizational), and can also be adopted for the digitalization of secondary education institutions. Particular attention is paid to solutions that allow to ensure the sustainable functioning and development of educational institutions in war and post-war times. The presented approach to building a «digital university» is based on the use of a hybrid server park for minimize financial costs for support while simultaneously ensuring a high level of availability of the educational institution’smain services and the introduction of an improved mode of synchronous learning, which is called «distributed synchronous mode». That mode is implemented by combining several territorially distributed classrooms, called nodes, to conduct a single scheduled class. This allows for the simultaneous holding of an educational session at several locations of the university also to connect individual students of higher education and teachers who are outside the boundaries of the locations. In this way, the implementation of the pedagogical approach «everything and everywhere» is ensured, which is extremely important especially in the conditions of modern challenges associated with military operations, and also provides advantages of development in the post-war period.