The key actor in any university management system is the rector; his/her priorities and goals to a large extent determine the prospects of the university. This conceptual article deals with the following issues: what a position in activity is; what a rector’s position is, why it should be the subject of the analysis; what rector’s positions can be; how a rector’s position can be formed.

The authors put forward the concept of «rector’s position», based on philosophical ideas about the position as a form of human subjectivity. As a basis for a typological analysis of rectors’ positions, a scheme «Position space» is proposed, wherein three poles are distinguished: «Norm», «Business», «Idea». The «ultimate» rectors’ positions corresponding to these poles are analyzed including the features of the ontological framework, priorities and goals, «operation spaces» and management tools used. It is shown that the designated space contains a whole range of rectors’ positions, as implemented through different management styles. The following rector’s positions are characterized: «Functionary», «Leader», «Investor», «Manager», «Entrepreneur». The formation of the rector’s position as an important part of his professional development is discussed.

The proposed typology of positions is based on the experience of the authors as participants in developing programs and flagship projects of universities, on the experience of professional communication with more than 30 rectors of Russian universities.

The article is original and new, as it puts forward the concepts of «a rector’s position» and «rector’s positions space». These concepts and the typology of the distinguished positions can be used as a tool for analyzing the rectors’ activity positions, for comprehending the imperatives and limitations inherent in these positions. The position scheme and the «operation space» scheme can serve as guidelines for analysing and assessing the completeness (or partiality) of the university leader’s position. These schemes can be also used in management consulting and as an element of educational programs for university rectors and management teams.

The paper studies the dynamics of scientific collaborations in leading Russian universities during 2010–2018. The author analyzes both individual and inter-organizational collaboration. Understanding how scientific cooperation is organized, its disciplinary specifics and qualitative differences provides important information for organizing scientific activities in universities. Based on bibliometric data we analyze changes in the number of authors and affiliated organizations according to publications from various scientific fields and quality segments. The sampling of the universities shows the growth of scientific collaboration both among individual scientists and among organizations. The number of works co-authored with Russian organizations is higher than with foreign ones, but the share of such works is rapidly decreasing. In the segment of high quality publications, universities collaborate more often than in the lower quality segment. At the same time, in the high quality segment universities more often collaborate with foreign institutions, whereas in the lower quality segment – with Russian organizations. The highest share of scientific collaboration is observed in physical sciences, the lowest – in social sciences. The analysis is limited by the data, which do not represent all collaborations between scientists.

Manual preparation and uploading information on university’s scientific publications to the Research Management System takes considerable time, and often it is not able to meet the deadlines. This challenge posed the task of automating these processes to the authors of the study. The method involves the use of standard office tools (Microsoft Word and Excel), so that employees who do not have specialized information technology knowledge and have an average level of computer skills could use it. The study demonstrated a 3.5-fold time costs reduction when generating information about university’s scientific publications automatically as compared to manual data entry in the Research Management System.

In March 2020, Russian higher education was pretty fast to start working remotely due to the threat of the Covid-19 spread. At the same time, discussions around the development of online education inRussiahave been ongoing for several years. Based on the data from semi-structured interviews with teaching staff in leading Russian universities, the paper studies issues related to using digital technologies and professors’ attitude to educational process digitalization. University teachers are shown to consider students and public policy as key drivers of the educational process digitalization. At the same time, the alarmist view on the active spread of digital technologies is still widespread. Professors who participated in the study did not consider different types of remote and online teaching as an equal substitute for traditional offline formats and technologies. This leads to conservative forecasts regarding the future of online and remote teaching. The results seem mostly important, since they present the situation in Russian universities on the eve of the forced transition to remote teaching due to the spread of the Covid-19 virus. These results make it possible to predict the difficulties that universities may face during the transition to emergency remote teaching.

The authors aim at comprehending the experience of managing the transition of KalugaStateUniversityto the remote way of implementing the educational process in the context of the 2020 pandemic. The article presents a conceptual vision of management tasks at the initial and subsequent stages of fundamental changes within the educational organization and the mechanisms used.

The article shows that managing the university in the conditions of extreme changes implied the feedback technology from the subjects of the educational process (students and teachers), which allowed the management team to receive information on the estimates of intermediate results and make timely adjustments for making adequate management decisions when moving to subsequent stages. Online surveys of students (10 days after the transition to distance learning) and teachers (during the fourth week of the quarantine) were organized as a feedback tool.

The authors suppose that the experience of the transition to a remote way of implementing the educational process in the spring of 2020 is of value to all subjects of the university space. The experience gained is useful to the management team for understanding the factors and mechanisms of extreme changes operational management, which made it possible to ensure a successful short-time solution of the task in the situation of uncertainty. For teachers and students, an important result was a sharp qualitative increase in the competence of using distance technologies in the educational process. The article might be of use to leaders and management teams of educational organizations for reflection and comparative analysis of such changes in their universities. A conceptual vision of management tasks at the initial and subsequent stages of fundamental changes in an educational organization, evaluating the effectiveness of the mechanisms used and decisions made, as well as working out feedback, including online polls, should help prevent the occurrence of negative consequences and work for the further development of the organization even in globally unfavorable conditions.

The extensive dissemination of digital technologies, their transnationality, transculturality, accessibility in almost every family and the implementation of ideas for building a digital economy are a challenge for the Russian system of professional education. The answers to this challenge are, in particular, the integration of open educational resources into the educational programs of higher education institutions, the formation of professional education architecture based on network forms of interaction in the national and global space, their wide extension containing certain difficulties and requiring additional study.

The aim of this review article is to analyze the situation in the sphere of digitalization of higher education, to specify the directions of transformation, the conditions and factors of Russian university teachers’ employment associated with the introduction of online courses in the educational programs of professional education, and to formulate and justify issues, which are to be studied in the process of additional empirical research.

The methodological reference point of the research is the concepts and theories of e-learning in higher education based on the integration of open educational resources into the educational process. The information base are the results of Russian and foreign scientists’ studies on the transformation of knowledge acquisition processes in the modern world, digitalization of education, evaluation of the effects of using open educational resources, loyalty and acceptance of online courses by the university community. The main research methods are review, analysis and synthesis, which allow to expand the understanding of online courses use in the university education system, and to formulate tasks for additional research of the teachers who integrate online courses.

Our analysis shows that the integration of online courses in higher education programs is an epoch’s demand conditioned by changes in the principles and technologies of knowledge transfer and development. Leading universities increasingly rely on open educational resources, the introduction of the latter providing all the participants (the University, the teacher, the student) with information, technological, temporary, economic, and image effects.

The Russian scientific space sees here the first raise of the following issues to be studied: 1) changes in the conditions of Russian university teachers’ employment in connection with the introduction of online courses in educational programs; 2) motivation for their activities on development and maintenance of online courses to date; 3) the opinion on the online courses as acceptable or rejectable in their professional activities.

This article might be of use for representatives of the university administration (concerning the problems of summarizing information about the introduction of online courses in the educational process, setting research questions to be studied for the formation of teaching staff’s loyalty and acceptance of this or that training system). Of no less interest should it be for any university teacher, as we try to detalize the content of online courses and to identify the effects of their implementation. In the nearest future, the authors intend to publish the results of an empirical study on online learning technologies perception by university teachers and on their attitude to these technologies.

Assessment of the quality of higher education and its management is not possible without answers to the following questions: what students should learn at the university; how the studying process at the university should be organized to achieve certain educational outcomes; what the role of students in the educational process is. Some researchers  attempted to answer these questions through developing conceptual assumptions related to building student-university relationships. However, today there is no systematic analysis of such conceptual models, which makes it difficult to compare them and choose the optimal one for the university according to its external conditions and resources. The article aims to analyze the models of organization of learning at the university and building relations between teachers and students. There are presented models, conceptualizing students as consumers, active learners, and partners. We also suggest the classification of the models by two criteria: 1) students’ activity in the learning process and 2) students’ participation in decision-making and creating educational products. The paper provides understanding which principles foreign universities use to interact with students and teachers as well as to develop educational policy. The article might be practically useful for the executives of Russian universities to help them decide on the educational strategies; of no less use would it be for the teachers to make them deeper understand their relations with students.

Annual Survey of Performance of Higher Education Institutions, conducted in Russiasince 2012, is the main source of open-access information on Russian universities. The discussion on the indicators of the Survey mainly focuses on their applicability for assessing higher education institutions (HEIs). The Survey, however, is not observed as a possible source of data for researchers in higher education. To remedy this deficiency, this paper evaluates the Survey data in terms of their quality and applicability for statistical analysis. The quality of the data is measured in four dimensions: accuracy, timeliness, completeness, and consistency. The technical convenience of the data is evaluated through the analysis of the variables distribution. The conclusion contains recommendations for researchers, who plan to use the Survey data for studying Russian higher education.

The paper is based on a survey conducted within the framework of the project «The Birth of a Russian Master» (initiated by the Institute of Education, HSE), its respondents being 3751 Bachelor’s degree students and 1147 Master’s degree students from 25 Russian universities. The importance of analysing students’ academic mobility, the organizational and financial measures taken to support it is proved by its increasing development. The purpose of this article is to identify management problems in the implementation of student mobility. Student mobility as a phenomenon is considered in two aspects: internationalization of education and students’ activity in building the trajectory of their professional development. Interpreting respondents’ answers, analysing government documents and university regulations made it possible to distinguish student mobility resources and management problems. The resources of student mobility include: state and non-state financial support for academic mobility, organizational and financial resources of universities, students’ activity in the sphere of their professional development. The academic mobility deterrents are: gaps in university regulation, limited financial resources, lacking readiness of the educational environment to implement incoming international students’ mobility. The study revealed the students’ professional activity and mobility, which are not taken into account within the educational process. As the authors conclude, it is necessary to create an «international environment» for international students’ integration in Russian education; to develop normative support of incoming and outgoing academic mobility; to organize a new scenario of university interaction with working students. The article may be of interest to the leaders of Russian universities.

Given the ambitious national strategies for science, innovations and university development inRussia, the availability for young highly qualified specialists who can be competitive at the global job market, is vital. At the same time, as of now,Russia, unlike many other countries, does not have a comprehensive set of initiatives addressing the brain drain among Russian students that obtain their degrees abroad. This article provides an analysis of motivations of Russian perspective graduate (master and doctoral) students who plan to study abroad and emigrate after graduation, as well as the factors that may positively affect their decision to return toRussia. In addition, the research provides an overview of international policies and practices to prevent the brain drain, and the opportunities for developing such policies in our country.

Work with foreign students in Chinais comprehensive and complex. It includes teaching, management, providing services and other aspects. With the increasing number of foreign students in China, these problems are becoming more complicated and the tasks more and more burdensome. Assimilative management, based on maintaining the characteristics of education management for foreign students to some extent, alleviates this situation. The objective of this study is to identify the true connotation of assimilative management by interpreting the relevant policies of the Chinese government about foreign students in Chinaand to find out ways and strategies of implementing assimilation management for foreign students in universities. The fundamental purpose of assimilative management is to optimize the allocation of university teaching, management and service resources, and ultimately improve the education quality for the foreign students. This paper analyzes the management practices of foreign students in Chinese universities for nearly 70 years, interprets the latest policies for foreign students in Chinaand explores the strategies of implementing these policies. 

David Staley, Director of the Humanities Institute at OhioStateUniversity, historian and futurologist, summarizes his ideas about the possible paths to the development of higher education. He invites everyone interested to immerse into alternative worlds of the future, where education transforms in quite a radical way after the universities having acquired new models, whose prototypes we can find in today’s reality. Using his historical imagination, redirected from the past to the future, Staley describes 1) Platform University, an analogue of a supermarket; 2) a system of Microcolleges based on the authority of central professors; 3) the Humanities Think Tank, giving a new role to the social sciences and humanities; 4) Nomad University, located everywhere and nowhere at the same time; 5) the Liberal Arts College, radically developing the ideas of liberal arts; 6) Interface University, built on the interaction of human and artificial intelligence; 7) the University of the Body, aiming to promote information processing by all human senses; 8) the Institute for Advanced Play, which relies on games, imagination, and the construction of alternative worlds; 9) Polymath University, which implies mastering three different specialties at a time and forms different types of thinking; 10) Future University, teaching both pure and applied futurology. The book was published in 2019 and accumulated all the advanced ideas in the sphere of higher education development paths, which makes it extremely relevant in the era of active reforms in this field.