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TOMSK POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY TACKLES GLOBAL CHALLENGES OF MODERN RUSSIAN HIGHER EDUCATION // Pedagogical Review. 2021. Issue 2 (36). P. 57-66

The article considers the urgent problem of improving the competitiveness of Russian universities in the global educational space. The problem is initiated by a challenging requirement to the system of Russian higher professional education, specifically, to comply with the modern pace of world development. This requirement is included in the list of global challenges for universities and is designated in the State Program of the Russian Federation “Development of Education in 2013–2020” as one of the crucial tasks of modernization and development of higher professional education. The launch of Project 5-100 has been the main vector of modernizing Russian higher education. The article aims to analyze the main provisions of Project 5-100, the methodology of world rankings ARWU, QS, THE and their indicators, the positions of Russian universities in the global educational space by the example of Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU), as well as to develop corrective measures. The main research methods were as follows: analysis of pedagogical literature, Project 5-100 documentation, methodology of world rankings ARWU, QS and THE, as well as analysis and synthesis of the information obtained. The study analyzed the positions of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Lomonosov Moscow State University and TPU in the world rankings and identified two groups of TPU activities: TPU strengths and underachievements with regard to QS ranking. As well, measures to fix underachievements by improving the quality of ranking indicators and providing the development of a multilingual environment, retraining teachers and revising educational programs were provided. An effective condition for the consolidation of the proposed measures, it is suggested to implement the teaching methods that would create conditions for the development of a multilingual environment, specifically, the methods involving the integration of subject knowledge and foreign language. The assumption regarding the effectiveness of methods integrating subject and language knowledge is based on their potential to strengthen the practical orientation of language practice among students and teachers, as well as reduce the time resource for mastering a foreign language for professional communication.

Keywords: higher education, university competitiveness, world university rankings, methodology of leading world rankings, QS, THE, project 5-100