Teaching standards of higher education: challenges to organizational and methodic support

The present paper is categorized as a research paper. The research objective is the analysis of scientific basis for the contents of course documentation for Federal State Standards for Higher Education. The paper explores and analyses problems of adaptation of contents and organization of Russian higher education to the results of the Bologna process. The analysis indicates that mechanical approaches to the interpretation of the concept of competences exert an overwhelming influence on the development of methodical guidelines and normative frameworks of organizational and methodic Documentation for Federal State Educational Standards of Higher Education. These approaches manifest in formal bureaucratic descriptions of proficiency in basic professional education programs presented as competency passports whose current contents hold no practical significance whatsoever for training modern specialists. The paper proposes original practices for development of course documentation conforming to Federal State Standards for Higher Education that implements a competence-based approach based on the fundamental properties of cross-disciplinarity, polyvalence and cumulativity, as well as supplementary materials on competence formation methods. The proposed recommendations and practical materials can also be used by lecturers in higher schools and university department managers for development of course documentation to implement a competence-based approach.