The Convergence Model of Education for Sustainability in the Transition to Digital Economy

Abstract

The paper studies the problem of updating educational programs and content, taking into account changing requirements of standards and employers for qualifications and competencies of specialists. First, we show that the updating process in transition to digital economy is associated with the transition to the convergence model of education providing its sustainability perspective. Furthermore, we propose the technique and develop basic models and methods for updating based on the convergence approach, for assessing the degree of convergence of competency models and educational content. The problems of collecting, consolidating, and extracting information on the required competencies from vacancy advertisements in open sources on the Internet are also considered. The convergence approach to updating educational programs is being introduced and tested in the information and learning environment of Penza State University (Penza, Russia).