1.2 Coronavirus’s quarantine in Russia
1.2.2 Situation after quarantine
As it was already written before some part of the secondary information is based on the government report. The same number of professors as it was at the end of May and twenty-four thousand twenty-four hundred twenty-eight students participated in the interview process at the end of May 2020 for a governmental report of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. In addition, there were forty-five rectors of Russian
universities who were questioned on the given topic of universities’ readiness for education through social networks. What is more, almost three million emails for social media were also considered for the final outcomes of the report. As it was mentioned before the period after quarantine is counted from the beginning of May 2020 due to the reason that the government of the country does not organize lockdown after that period due to many different reasons which will be discussed in detail in further subchapters.
1.2.2.1 University infrastructure and teacher’s awareness in social networks
The university infrastructure and teacher’s ability to use social networks and the Internet are varying from university to university but a common situation shows that most of the professors are not happy with following changes in the sphere of education. There are some factors that are influencing that. On the one side, the technical staff could provide support to pedagogues in this coronavirus period, however, the number of such people at universities is not so large. Hence, the resources will only be enough to develop standard solutions and support a small part of interested professors. At the same time, the rest of the teachers have to be content with the technological solutions available at the university in the form of learning management system (LMS) platforms or the delivery of content by e-mail to students.
It is impossible to have online learning without information technologies which need to have some investment flows on the education of professors in the usage of social networks and teach people online. The investment should also be done of development of the online platform for students and professors or for purchasing full access to already known social network in order to provide a better quality of collaboration and for many other tasks.
According to the Ministry of Education in Russia, “at the time of the transition to the distance format, about 19% of the teaching staff had problems with the equipment necessary for work, by the end of May the share of such teachers decreased to 13%”. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Interesting to know that some students were not indifferent, and they voluntarily suggested organizing IT support for their pedagogues where twenty percent of professors got the help. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) “Digital volunteers assisted educators with setting up and using online platforms and assisting with related technical issues.”
(Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Indeed, there were many professors who have not good equipment, laptops or computers, for better cooperation with students. Some had problems with the absence of a camera required for qualified video conferences or online classes. As has been noted universities did not provide personal laptops for each of the pedagogues but only suggested using computers at universities. Henceforth, teaches needed to come to universities in order to use these laptops or computers, however, this could endanger their health as they could get infected by coronavirus being at universities or even getting to it.
Around 13 percent of universities in the Russian Federation was not equipped with a good level of infrastructure, it included cloud storages, high-speed Internet, and digital systems for the management of the education process. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Even when most universities have LMSs, but less than half of them is using the systems. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Straightaway, about 80 high schools out of 741 had digital infrastructure suitable for
taking distance lessons and for publishing required materials for them in a school server.
As a matter of fact, 88,51 percent of universities’ dormitories provided the Internet for their students. Under those circumstances, the education system was not ready for the 2020 challenge, namely to the teaching of students during quarantine due to the coronavirus. This outcome pushed the government of the country to reconstruct the sharing of budget and pay more attention to the digital infrastructure of universities.
1.2.2.2 The use of digital communication platforms by universities
Under coronavirus circumstances, universities were forced to choose one of the most suitable ways for teaching students. There were some options for that, the first one was to transfer the learning process for some specialization to the next study year, to send students tasks online and ask them to send homework back to professors, while teachers will also recommend the list of literature required for doing the homework. The last method was to have standard online lections where pedagogues will explain material by themselves and all students will be able to watch it live and ask questions about it. Surely, the last way makes the lives of students much easier and is saving time spent at universities. Also, this way of education requires the use of digital communication platforms through which the contact between professor and students will be possible. Such platforms as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Blue Jeans, BlackBoard, and many others allow to have video conferences for more than 2 and more people, however, some of them ask for additional payments for it. Henceforth, this access should be financed by someone.
According to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, 44 percent of Russian universities have admission to social networks, such as Zoom, which allows making video conferences. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Nevertheless, not all of those universities were using this admission during distance learning. As it was already written before there were three possible ways for teaching students in the pandemic situation and only twenty-eight percent of high schools used social networks. Among those universities, there were some which opened accesses to various online libraries and even some had an agreement with international book storages. Some months later in April, more universities started to use digital communication platforms for educating students, and fifty-seven percent of people studied through online conferences. What is more, through one month this number was increased even more to 83 percent in higher education. It was reached by tutoring professors or some disciplines to teach their subject through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others. This seventeen percent are existing due to such subjects which were not able to teach online such as physical training which is still mandatory subject for most of the universities in the Russian Federation.
In details, the most used platform was electronic mails what is suitable for the first method of education during the quarantine. This method was used by more than half percent of students, on the next place there is Zoom platform, which was popular among sixty-four percent of people, on the third place is the learning management system. (see Fig. 3.) The last one is done by universities and almost 61,1 percent applied them in education. (see Fig.
3.) Another social network is Moodle which is used by 27,9 percent for better integration between professors and students. (see Fig. 3.) What is more, other digital communication platforms as WhatsApp, VKontakte, Facebook, and others were used for communication in
48 percent. (see Fig. 3.) Undoubtedly, such proportions can vary from university to university based on the way of education which was chosen by the management of a university. Every university chose the most comfortable way for educating students, however, most of them rely on their internal infrastructure, financial facilities, students and teachers’ abilities to collaborate online, and common permissibility system which will eliminate any violations of external and internal rules in the educational institutions in Russia.
Figure 3. Usage of digital communication platforms in distance learning in Russia during coronavirus quarantine (Aleshkovsky, 2020)
What is more, the researched data can vary and, for example, Alexander Serikov who is a representative of OSP journal got a little bit different data in his survey with students.
According to the source, when professors were working remotely with students, they were using systems of electronic education, but the most popular communication tool was WhatsApp. (Serikov, 2020) “The survey also noted the high mobility and responsiveness of social networks, especially when it comes to message boards and platforms for the exchange of information between teachers and students.” (Serikov, 2020) Also, digital communication platforms replace here the lack of personal communication of students in a group during the full-time study. What is more, communication tools in training were also noted by Zoom what was around fifty percent (and as it was written before respondents rated the capabilities of Zoom by the training methods used for streams of 100 people lasting no more than 40 minutes), there were forty-three percent of respondents voted for Skype, Instagram was thirty-nine percent and thirty-eight voted for Webinar, Big Blue Button, Google Hangouts and Proficonf together. (Serikov, 2020)
1.2.2.3 Adaptation to a new format of education
Definitely, the adaptation process can be different for people depending on their previous experience with online education and usage of social networks. Not every professor was sure of the effectiveness of digital education, but there were some people who said that such a
way is even much comfortable than the traditional one. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Surely, the adaptation is lying not only on students and teachers but also on the management of universities and governmental organizations which are responsible for organization study process in the most comfortable way for all the participants of education. In particular, there was only sixty percent of universities designed web pages for professors at universities that were aimed to support them during coronavirus. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) According to the Ministry of education in Russia, this was organized fast and all of the universities got access to theoretical material for teaching online. The generous part of professors at least once used them, and it led to the cooperation of professors in specialized web chats where they shared their experience with each other in a new way of studying. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) The beginning of quarantine was at the end of March, at this time many universities decided to take control into their hands and to create a way for further education of students.
Nevertheless, some high schools were afraid to do any independent activities and were waiting for a solution from the government. (RBC, 2020) The reason for that can be high power distance and a high level of bureaucracy. The proportion of such universities is 70/30 where seventy universities started their first actions for using digital communication platforms by themselves and thirty universities which were waiting for the solution from others. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) However, students and professors underlined lack of communication and disability to get the required information from each other. Especially such a problem was at the beginning of the quarantine period, but it was partially solved.
Some universities started to post various information on their web pages which could be helpful for students and even teacher during online education. (RBC, 2020) Nevertheless, forty-five percent of students and sixty-eight percent of professors confirmed that university gives them not enough information for online or even self-education. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020)
Opinion of teachers was divided based on the program which they teach and those who used digital communication platforms even before coronavirus quarantine. Teachers who instructed people to practical activities such as work with airplane simulator, train, assembly of machines, artists, musicians, sportsmen, and many other professional tasks, were against online education. However, the situation obliges professors to adapt and to create a way of teaching such professions. For instance, artists and people from creative sciences got their homework by email and sent photos of finished works back. (Vesti, 2020) Another example is sportsmen who trained directly in front of a camera in video chats with their trainers. (KGUFKST, 2020) Another group of professors who used digital communication platforms even before the quarantine adopted rapidly and even improved their abilities. There were defined 25 percent of such teachers and 40 percent of them were from top-ranking universities. (Minobrnauki.gov, 2020) Nevertheless, the greater number of pedagogues (seventy-five percent) were not among advanced users what created a problem in the transition process.
The most compelling evidence is that at the beginning of spring 2020 there was discussed such a topic as "Modern digital educational environment in the Russian Federation" by representatives in the educational sphere of the Russian Federation. (Shuvalova, 2020) The main part of this discussion was about the issue of the lack of domestic electronic educational resources. According to this meeting, now students have access to online
courses in one of the state web educational pages, online.edu.ru, where about 1 thousand courses are available. (Shuvalova, 2020) Today, through one year after this discussion, this number is even higher. Correspondingly, there are other web pages for self – education and one of the most popular foreign platforms is Coursera which has more than thirty thousand various courses. (Shuvalova, 2020) Nonetheless, universities had to decide which digital platforms to use directly for organizing distance learning activities. Undoubtedly, those universities which used electronic educational resources and had different elements of distance learning in educational programs before coronavirus quarantine turned out to be in a more advantageous position than other educational institutions in Russia.
As a consequence, there is a number of problems associated with the use of the educational process of the universities. For instance, there is a low level of motivation and competence of teachers in the field of information and communication technologies. Although, a high degree of teacher labor in organizing and supporting the learning process, but they are frequently lacking open access to digital communication platforms from classrooms. By the same talking, there were much more problems with this adaptation to a new format of universities’ work which would be discussed in further chapters.
Indeed, most universities strengthened cooperation with each other in time of the transition of universities to online learning. This cooperation was improved also with national education authorities, representatives of educational platforms, and international organizations. In addition, organizations provided each other methodological support in how to use digital tools in learning and they shared up-to-date educational courses. There were organized informal groups of students, teachers, and university administrators and it was created on various platforms. This supported solving their problems in terms of online learning with help of discussion. As an illustration of gradual improvements, the number of online offers for pieces of training was increased and now absolutely different people who want to get new knowledge from different spheres can do it and it is available for various categories of activities. The process was also organized online through social networks.