Sociological education before the challenges of the pandemic: new educational technogies

Abstract

This article is devoted to the actual problems of the organization and implementation of the educational process during the new coronavirus infection COVID-19. The authors consider two aspects of digital transformation in Russian education – from the point of view of the use of digital technologies to automate various processes of educational organizations and from the point of view of the introduction of a complex of digital technologies in order to build a learning model that will be based on the effective use of these technologies to solve professional tasks.The article emphasizes that the process of digitalization of society in our country developed evenly, without any special jumps, but the pandemic served as a catalyst for the development of digital technologies, and the process of digitalization itself was divided into “before” and “after” the beginning of the pandemic. During the pandemic, the younger generation artificially fell out of the mainstream not only of full-fledged socialization, which takes place within educational institutions and in the circle of teachers and peers, but also found themselves facing numerous problems related to the violation of the traditional educational process. In many ways, teachers and staff of the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University were able to overcome this problem by quickly and effectively rebuilding the educational process so that it did not lose its traditionally high quality.The authors of the article share their experience in organizing the educational process at the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University, which took place in the so-called mixed format for almost two years and was accompanied by the active introduction of the latest educational technologies, including synchronous (video conferences, video consultations and feedback online, chat rooms, Skype communication, virtual classes) and asynchronous e-learning, as well as project-based learning and the so-called “inverted classroom”. The results of educational monitoring are presented, which showed the high efficiency of the educational process at the Faculty of Sociology in difficult conditions.The authors also considered the key trends of digitalization of education, identified its positive aspects and analyzed in detail the negative aspects, a special place among which is occupied by the virtualization of education as a social institution.