Online Courses: To Accept Impossible to Ignore

Abstract

Online courses are changing the landscape of higher education. However, their adoption by the teaching community of Russian universities has not yet been fully studied. The conducted sociological research made it possible to assess the involvement of Russian university lecturers in the processes of digitalization of education, to determine the motives for their activities in creating and integrating online courses into the educational process, and to form an understanding of the acceptance of online learning by the Russian teaching community. The pyramid of acceptance of Cox and Trotter’s open educational resources is a repulsive idea for the study. The empirical basis of the study was the responses and opinions of teachers of Russian universities, representing different categories of universities.The results of the research can be of practical significance in determining the directions of social policy of education digitalization at the state level in terms of developing stimulating and motivating measures and measures to support and provide the necessary guarantees to lecturers, especially regional ones, during the transformation period.

Keywords

• education digitalization
• online courses
• open educational resources
• russian universities
• teaching community
• teachers’ opinions
• threats of employment