DIGITALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION AS A NEW SOCIAL REALITY

Abstract

The article substantiates the thesis that digitalization of higher education leads to an essential change of educational paradigms, transformation of the value model of the professional community. The contradiction in the value attitudes of university staff, in particular, teachers and administrators, gives rise to many conflict situations and is the cornerstone of failure, a brake on the reform of higher education (digital mimicry). The purpose of the article is to identify the causes and consequences of institutional changes in higher education in the context of the introduction of digital technologies from the standpoint of a sociological explanatory model. The subject of the research is the processes of digitalization of higher education. As a result of theoretical and empirical studies, the authors proved that conflicts in the university community lead to the emergence of a new social reality – to the division of the academic community into rationalists and traditionalists, and the formation of a value model of professional rationality. And if network technologies do not seriously affect the everyday life of modern students and schoolchildren, for teachers they create a new, unstable socio-cultural environment that has a convergent, mixed nature of social interactions. The prestige of the teaching profession now directly depends on the ability to respond to the requests and needs of the network personality.