Metamodels of Educational and Methodological Activity in the University

Abstract

Purpose of the study. Educational methodological activity plays an important role in the life of the university, on the one hand, it determines the content of the educational process and sets the direction of development, on the other hand, it requires a significant amount of time from teachers, staff and managers. Continuing changes in the system of Russian higher education are reflected in educational methodological activities. When introducing and refining higher education standards and other normative documents, the means of describing the educational process in educational and methodological documentation change. The composition of educational methodological documents and the requirements for them are changing. Such concepts as “competence”, “type of activity”, “tasks of professional activity”, “labor functions”, etc. appear and then transform. The present work aims to track the dynamics of these changes and assess the increase in the complexity of educational methodological support. Materials and Methods. To assess the dynamics of development of educational and methodological support, we will carry out a retrospective substantive analysis of educational and methodological support for each stage of its development, starting with the first generation of state educational standards. The analysis results will be visualized with the Entity-Relationship" diagrams, which allow reflecting the main entities of the scope, their attributes and relationships. Examples of entities are: competence, professional standard, educational result (different forms of skills), topic, module, etc. Such diagrams can be interpreted as metamodels of educational and methodological support. Next, we will carry out a comparative analysis of the obtained sequence of metamodels, which will allow us to understand the dynamics of their development. Results. A set of metamodels of educational and methodological activities was built. The dynamics of the growth of the number of entities and relationships by year was found. We also studied changes in entities and details. A set of metamodels of educational and methodological activities was built, including metamodels for the following stages: state educational standards of the first generation, second generation, federal state educational standards or the third generation, generation 3+, generation 3 ++. If the first two models are characterized by relative simplicity, then the standards of the third generation required the development of a significant number of new entities associated with competencies, and another increase in complexity is observed for generation 3 ++, which is associated with the introduction of professional standards. The dynamics of growth in the number of entities, attributes and especially relationships has been established. Over the past two decades, the number of entities that are used in the creation of educational and methodological support has increased from 9 to 32, and the number of connections between them from 12 to 45. Changes in individual entities and details were also studied as the metamodels of educational and methodological support developed. Conclusion. Based on the results of the analysis, describing tools for the educational and methodological support tend to become considerably more sophisticated. This is reflected in the labor costs of the formation of documents, as well as the time that must be spent by teachers and staff on studying the language of description of educational and methodological documents. Thus, there are risks of the educational and methodological support quality reducing and the risk of a gap between educational and methodological documentation and the real educational process of the university.