The chapter focuses on the main patterns of social development, causing the modernization of existing educational standards for training modern specialists. The authors analyze multiple paradigms existing in different educational systems in the context of the ongoing globalization and social transition to digitalization. The chapter reviews the development of educational standards and concepts in their retrospect over the past 30 years. The authors describe the features and tasks of Russian higher education in the transition from one generation of standards to another under the influence of the fourth industrial revolution. Nowadays, the chapter argues, one of the strategic goals of modern education is the formation of subject and metacognition knowledge. The authors emphasize that educational tasks related to the creation of critical activities for the digital society and their corresponding digital competencies do not lose their particular relevance.
Top1 Introduction
In the context of the development of Russian society (Presidential Executive Office, 2017) and digitalization of the Russian economy (Presidential Executive Office, 2019), one of the central places in human life is given to the problems of modernization and digitalization of education at its different levels (Russian Federation, 2017). At the same time, the main task is not only the training of a modern person as the one who owns the competencies necessary for living in a digital society, but who also actually has a highly qualified specialist for any professional sphere who can solve different problems in the context of digitalization.
The solution to this socially significant task of modern society certainly lies in the educational standards of both general and higher education, which must meet the requirements of the time, take into account scientific and technological achievements, and correspond to the level of social development. At the same time, educational standards, during their modernization and development, should not only have promising directions for their future development but also maintain a certain continuity with the previous generations of educational standards.
Nowadays, in our opinion, higher education should conduct a retrospective analysis of the development of both the content of educational standards and the concepts of professional training of modern specialists, which are the basis of the standard and meet the requirements of the present.
Before turning to the consideration of this issue, we should note that the primary external prerequisite for the development of the information society and the informatization of education was the transition to a digital economic society (Jackson, 2019; Pacheco, Lips & Yoong, 2018).
One should note that for the first time on a global scale, the movement towards the digital economy was marked in 2016 when the UN Ministerial Conference on Digital Economy was adopted at the UN Ministerial Conference in Cancun (Mexico) (OECD, 2016). It was this document that indicated the main objectives of the development of the digital economy for the first time. It also emphasized the need to develop global technical standards that could ensure the compatibility and security of technologies based on access to the global Internet.
In Russia, the transition to the digital economy was announced in the annual message of the President of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation in 2019. The president suggested “to launch a large-scale system program for the development of the economy of a new technological generation, the so-called digital economy” (Presidential Executive Office, 2019).
Earlier in the Strategy for the Development of the Information Society in Russia for 2017–2030, the most crucial goal was identified as the creation of conditions for the formation of a knowledge society. The development of human potential and the formation of a digital economy were recognized as its priority interests. The list of the main areas of development of Russian information and communication technologies includes processing large amounts of data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, cloud and fog computing, the Internet of Things, robotics and biotechnologies, radio engineering and electronic components, information security, etc. (Presidential Executive Office, 2017).
These trends initiated a significant number of studies around the world (Sanina, Kutergina & Balashov, 2020; Lin et al., 2020; Leahy, Holland & Ward, 2019; Olszewski & Crompton, 2020), including in the framework of the annual interdisciplinary, international conference Smart Education and E-Learning (Beshenkov et al. 2016). However, these studies, as a rule, are limited. In general, they analyze the possibilities of using new digital technologies to solve specific educational problems (for example, learning a foreign language using augmented reality technologies). The overall strategy of using them for educational purposes still remains without proper attention. In this paper, the authors analyze the systemic challenges of modern digital society, the opportunities and risks of digital technologies, including those listed above, and determine the ways of their reflection in educational standards.