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Implementation of modern information technologies to practice of higher education institutions is not a fad. Traditions are important for universities, but there are at least two factors, which make reforms inevitable. Main of them is a fact that the world is very changeable nowadays; all actors of the process: students, employers, even professors themselves, are under rapid change. Second reason is the fact that new possibilities can make teaching more effective, even within the traditional paradigm.
Undoubtedly, higher education needs to upgrade its programmes to outfit students for the highly digitised and automated environment of Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 supposes the use of network approach that is based on the ability of creating smart products and components (Vasin, et al., 2018a). “Smart” education would be a natural progression in industry 4.0., a framework for which is still emerging but would definitely require preparing education for this digital transformation. In consideration of future employment domains, students should be prepared to meet the new demands resulting from a fourth industrial revolution.
The current article is devoted to one of actual problems: how to use, in effective way, such IT technologies as Big Data and Internet of Things in higher education? Naturally, there are many ways to answer; and, probably, unlimited number of details, which can be useful for planning such activity. We shall stress on several aspects, which like for as important ones, and shall base on some practical experiences, collected by the authors, mainly at Penza State University, Russia. Main topic of the work is big data storage and processing in education process with focus on IT realization of some processes. Naturally, university can benefit from accumulation of meaningful data.
Importance of the new IT is connected with social mission of higher education. To respond to the needs of digital transformation, universities must continue to play their role as proving ground for educating the future generation and innovation. Close collaboration with social environment, with employers and other stakeholders is a core element of the strategy Education 4.0 (Chao, 2017; Hussin, 2018). According to the University 4.0 concept (Dewar, 2017), universities will be transformed to embrace know-how and ideas by adapting their administrative paradigm and the investment in human resources and giving more priority to serve the objectives of society.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In the first two sections, an overview of Big Bata and IoT technologies, with stress on their use in the field of higher education, is presented. The third section is about a practical experience of the authors in implementation of the modern IT in practice of the distance learning system of Penza State University. The fourth section, which consists of several subsections, is devoted to discussion of program realization of the approaches in some special cases. In conclusion section the authors presented possible applications of obtained results for the theory and practice and discussed possible future research directions.
The article does not pretend on deep didactical analysis of the new methodology, although general ideas about its impact on education process have been expressed.