Digital University

Problem and goal. In the context of digital globalization traditional forms of communication at the university are forced to transform in order to meet educational objectives. However, the established practice of building communications in universities in new formats has revealed a number of problems of ineffective interaction between participants in the educational process. The article aims to identify the main features of the transformation of the forms of communication in distance learning at the university. Particular attention is paid to the conditions for the formation of an effective digital dialogue in the university-student-teacher triad.
Materials and research methods. The study of the transformation of communication is considered from an economic, pedagogical, and philological (semiological) point of view. The economic approach includes consideration of resource constraints that prevent the development of various forms of communication in the educational space, and an assessment of the effectiveness of the communication process. The pedagogical approach allows to evaluate the technologies and formats of communication in online learning. The semiological approach is focused on the choice of techniques and schemes that are adequate to digital dialogue. The empirical research was carried out using the questionnaire. The survey involved 2–4-year students at the Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin.
Research results. In the 2020–2021 academic year, students were able to adapt to rapid inclusion in distance learning and the use of digital technologies, but half of the students prefer to return to the traditional format of education, 39% of students for a mixed (blended learning) format. It was found that if the verbal forms of communication when transferring the course content from the teacher to the students were not transformed taking into account the digital environment and online learning, then this could lead to unnecessary complexity for perception (according to 54.5% of respondents), the appearance of information noise, as a consequence, the appearance of discomfort (for 40% of the respondents) and attempts to avoid communication (for 18%). 52% of students indicated that their opinion about distance improved over time.
Discussion and conclusions. The authors concluded that digital skills today mean more than digital literacy. In communication, it is important to develop new technologies, techniques and tools that are adequate to new educational and upbringing tasks. And in modern conditions, burdened by pandemic threats, other ways of digitalizing the university with the construction of effective communications are rather impossible.

This book proposes a philosophical exploration of the educational role that media plays in university study practices, with a focus on the practices of lecturing and academic writing. Are the media employed in university study practices mere accessories, or rather constitutive of these practices? While this seems to be a purely theoretical question, its practical implications are wide and concern whether such a thing as a ‘digital university’ is possible. The 'digital university' has been, for a long time, a theoretical construct. However, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, moving the university into the digital realm has become a necessity. The difficulties in transitioning to an online university during the 2020 pandemic showed the increased urgency of the questions explored in this book.
The book describes lecturing and academic writing through the lens of a phenomenology of gestures and arrives at a description of the experience of university thinking as expanding the subject’s range of experiences about the world and about one’s modes of thinking about the world. The media configuration characteristic for university study practices is a movement of rendering inoperative one medium through another medium so that thinking can emerge, a movement called ‘mediatic displacement’. The question of the digital university becomes then a question whether mediatic displacement is possible on a digital screen. Although this is conceivable, digital technologies are still relatively new, and we are not used to playing with them in a profanatory way as the book discusses through the example of videoconferencing and MOOCs. The promise of the digital university seems to remain utopian until we figure out how to enact the techniques of mediatic displacement currently flourishing at the physical university.

Discussions of ‘big data’ in Higher Education have focused on what the institution can know about its students, and its ability to act on their behalf. These discussions appear learner-centred, but continue to attribute agency to the institution. An alternative way of framing the use of data is offered by the quantified self movement. This focuses attention on the user, asking how technology creates new representations of the self, what these mean to them, and how it changes their relationships with others. This paper will drawn on this alternative framing to raise questions about the use of students’ data, and about who could and should be expected to know about and to act on learners’ experiences.

Recent research on the digital university drawn on the concept of ‘resilience’ – however, it has done so in two unrelated ways. The first draws on systems theory to explore how Universities are adapting to the challenges they perceive from digital technologies (Weller & Anderson, 2013). The other explores students’ experiences of technology, highlighting the need for persistence and adaptation in the face of challenging situations (Gourlay & Oliver, 2013; Ross et al, 2013). However, it does not draw explicitly from prior resilience research. To address this, this paper will review previous research on resilience, focusing on educational resilience and linking this to contemporary discussions of student persistence and learning with digital technology. A sociomaterial perspective will be developed (Fenwick et al, 2011) that both responds to the shortcomings of prior research and also offers the possibility of bridge between individual and institutional perspectives on resilience.

The need for a Web portal to support the rapidly growing field of learning technology has been well established through a number of national surveys and scoping studies over recent years. The overarching vision has been the provision of a virtual environment to assist in informing and developing professional practice in the use of learning technologies. This paper outlines the issues and challenges in creating such a portal through the experiences of developing the RESULTs Network. In the paper, design and participation issues are considered within the wider context of online and networked approaches to supporting practice and professional development. User participation methodologies and technical developments for RESULTs are described in relation to a review of existing representations of practice and a comprehensive survey amongst the learning technology users' community. An outline of key achievements and experiences is presented, followed by some conclusions regarding the cultural and political issues in creating a viable and sustainable facility and suggestions for possible future direction in national provision.

This article aims to distinguish and depict the features of communications and collaborations in contemporary universities through the concept of trading zones. The author also considers the role that the idea of a digital university might play in shaping interactions in transforming local context where different actors can find a common ground of exchange. The new contexts, including the pragmatic orientation of contemporary society and new technologies and environments, contribute to reconsidering the idea of the classical university, in which interactions between professors and students have outstepped customary collaborations in laboratories, as well as the idea of education and research integration. This article focuses on distinguishing new forms of interactions, boundary practices, and environments, which are suggested by today’s universities. Proceeding from them, the author argues that new concepts of the university, such as the digital university, and renovated campuses—to some extent—contribute to the adaptation of a renewed idea of Humboldt’s Bildung.