Import substitution of the software used in the educational process in Russian universities

Abstract

The article aims to draw the attention of the faculty and academic as well as managerial staff of Russian higher education institutions to the necessity of switching the educational process to national software. The article presents the result of structural modeling of the problem under examination, namely import substitution of the software used in the educational process in Russian universities. The analysis of relevant scientific literature and the documentation available on the official websites of several Russian universities made it possible to describe the set of information and communication platforms used to run distance learning classes and secure other objectives of academic electronic and educational environment. Additionally, the examination of a wide array of educational and methodological literature provided by the leading national electronic library systems resulted in the description of the current state of the educational and methodological support for the use of national office software in the process of teaching informatics and the range of academic disciplines “Information Technologies” to higher education students studying humanities and social sciences. To conduct training sessions in these areas, the experience of using the Russian Р7-Office software package described in the article can be adopted in the educational process. To support the thesis that Russian office software and fonts can be used in educational and research work “here and now”, the author wrote this article in the PT Astra Serif font in the Р7-Office text editor. The work was saved without any loss of formatting as a Microsoft Word document with the Times New Roman font required by editors of scientific journals. Switching to the use of national software in the educational process poses a problem of varying degrees of seriousness to universities in other states, including strategic partners of the USA, the country under whose jurisdiction the copyright holders of most information and communication programs, office software reside.