Education, quality and the digital transformation

Abstract

Quality of education from the point of view of different stakeholders is considered taking into account the ongoing digital transformation revolution with the unprecedented speed and scale of changes. A quality of a student's life added by an academic program is believed to be the most comprehensive characteristic of the quality of the program. A short list of key requirements for higher education academic programs to keep their high quality under digital transformation is proposed. It is noted that academic programs need to maintain a relatively slow-changing cross-disciplinary fundamental theoretical core in the relevant field of knowledge, and develop project and research competencies. In order to adapt to technological changes in the professional sphere, a need for continuous design of courses to meet anticipatory professional competence packages is pointed out. These courses may form a rapidly changing part of the program for individual educational trajectories. The necessity to develop universal competencies in the field of information and communication technologies, as well as skills for using methods of pattern recognition theory, which is fundamental for deep machine learning, is noted. Possibilities of using both Mass Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Online Program Management (OPM) services in academic programs are considered.