Avatar-Based Learning and Teaching as a Concept of New Perspectives in Online Education in Post-Soviet Union Countries: Theory, Environment, Approaches, Tools

Introduction

Avatar-Based Learning and Teaching (A-BL&T) as a concept of control and managing knowledge in modern socio-economic conditions (Mkrttchian and Aleshina, 2017) is a way of assessing a university’s economic efficiency. A central component of the economic efficiency of the university is the cost of educational services. In general, the total price of the university services is an expression of all expenses for their creation, that is, the amount of the depreciation fund (equipment, buildings, structures), a revolving fund (current costs: wages with charges, charges for public utility services and others) and fund of development.

The development and implementation of innovative technologies in the educational process objectively require significant upfront costs: costs of preparing academic content, training teachers and staff, the costs associated with the organization of communication and the purchase of additional computer equipment, and other capital investments. Institutions are increasingly faced with difficult decisions related to their technology investments. When costs associated with developing, delivering, and providing support services for learning are closely examined, the challenges become stark (Blouin, et al., 2009). However, the cost of new educational services should not increase substantially. If we accept that the aim of administrative decisions is university’s economic development, then the following relationship may serve as one of the performance indicators:P_f=F / Cwhere:

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  P_f is the performance indicator;

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  F is the difference between the funds gained as a result of the management decisions and the costs of implementation of these decisions;

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  C is the costs of implementing management decisions.

Along with the common activities of operation and development in Russian universities, there are important features of the organization of educational processes in the university with the distance education and distributed learning.

Analysis of the organization of educational process in higher educational institutions with the distributed structure points to the following features:

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  Student groups for the study of each discipline formed from students living in different regions of the Russian Federation;

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  Teachers need to be skilled in conducting classes with the use of distance learning technologies, provided by working programs of disciplines;

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  Increased demands on the structuring, storage, monitoring and updating of training materials;

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  Planned load of teachers is calculated according to the complexity of educational activities carried out within the planned schedule online (analogue the classroom activities in traditional training) and training activities carried out in offline mode (analogue the individual work of students in traditional education);

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  Actual load of teachers per semester is calculated based on the planned load in accordance with the operational monitoring of the movement of the trainees contingent;

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  The price of educational services is calculated in accordance with the level of the salary of the region, where the students are taught;

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  Accounting and distribution of the funds should be conducted on the basis of the budgets of each department of the university distributed structure.