University professors and the digitalization of education: on the threshold of force majeure transition to studying remotely

In March 2020, Russian higher education was pretty fast to start working remotely due to the threat of the Covid-19 spread. At the same time, discussions around the development of online education inRussiahave been ongoing for several years. Based on the data from semi-structured interviews with teaching staff in leading Russian universities, the paper studies issues related to using digital technologies and professors’ attitude to educational process digitalization. University teachers are shown to consider students and public policy as key drivers of the educational process digitalization. At the same time, the alarmist view on the active spread of digital technologies is still widespread. Professors who participated in the study did not consider different types of remote and online teaching as an equal substitute for traditional offline formats and technologies. This leads to conservative forecasts regarding the future of online and remote teaching. The results seem mostly important, since they present the situation in Russian universities on the eve of the forced transition to remote teaching due to the spread of the Covid-19 virus. These results make it possible to predict the difficulties that universities may face during the transition to emergency remote teaching.