Prof. Vitaly Kopnov is Advisor at the Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University (RSVPU), Yekaterinburg, Russian Federation, where he has been since 2013. He received Doctor of Engineering in Reliability and Quality Control from the Ural State Forest Engineering University in 1999 where he worked as the Director of the Quality of Life Institute. His research interests span both Vocational Education and Training (VET) and Higher Education (HE) in college-university-enterprise cooperation. Much of his work is on improving the understanding, design, and performance of professional development courses for HE and VET teachers on developing learning outcomes, work-based learning, lifelong learning, opportunity recognition, and transdisciplinarity. He provides assistance, consulting services, and constructive feedback to potential applicants interested to apply for EU-funded programmes in the field of higher education (partner’s search, application writing, project management, and coordination, financial reporting). He serves also as an ETF correspondent in Russia.
Digital transformation of vocational pedagogical education and training: experience and practice of the Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Presented together with Dr Natalya Lomovtseva and Dr Olga Shmurygina.
The report examines the experience of conducting and the impact of the RSVPU on the digital transformation of vocational pedagogical education and training in the Russian Federation, including the teaching experience in the era of the coronavirus pandemic. RSVPU in its research relies on international, federal, and regional projects developing models of digital competencies/skills. Currently, the most widespread in the Russian education are models, coupled with global trends: the Digital Skills in Vocational Education and Training proposed at the G20 Summit (2017); “Target Competency Model 2025”, prepared based on the results of BCG research “Russia 2025. From Human Resources to Talents”, and DigCompEdu adopted in 2017, which confirms that teachers need a set of special digital skills specific to their profession.
The report describes how the teacher’s roles change, transform, and expand significantly. A number of requirements are also put forward for the skills of the teacher, for the digital literacy and ability to create and apply content through digital technologies, including the skills of computer programming, search, information exchange, communication. In particular, the teacher must be willing to work in an ever-changing digital learning environment.
In Russia, government interest in teachers’ digital training is supported by several priority national projects. However, they place more emphasis on schoolteachers and university academics, and rarely mentions the digital competence of VET teachers. This is confirmed also by the peculiarities of the implementation of the educational process in the current situation. On the basis of European and Russian data obtained in the Pro-VET project, the RSVPU defined an algorithm for the digital transformation of the process of vocational pedagogical education and training, and also carried out a research, in which the readiness of teachers to use digital technologies in the educational process was analyzed.