Online Education in the Russian Arctic: Employers’ Confidence and Educational Institutions’ Readiness

The rapid spread of online learning demonstrates that it is becoming one of the trends in the development of vocational education in the modern world. Along with the obvious advantages of online learning such as cost reduction, cross-border opportunities for receiving it, and adaptability for students, educational institutions encounter specific difficulties: a lack of optimal teaching methods, inflexibility of the institutional environment to the use of new teaching technologies, the transformation of communication between teachers and students, and technological unpreparedness for the development of online learning. At the same time, the need to solve the problem of accessibility of education and fill the shortage of labor resources in Russia, in particular its Arctic zone (AZRF), will contribute to the spread of online learning practices. To consider developing online education, this article, on the one hand, presents the results of a study of the regional employers’ confidence in education in a non-traditional format and, on the other hand, shows the readiness of vocational educational institutions to implement training programs in a distance format. The main research method was a questionnaire survey, in which 2240 organizations and 344 professional educational institutions located in the Russian Arctic took part. The survey results indicate that more than half of employers (58%) declared the applicability of online learning in the Russian Arctic, but about 40.6% of companies do not consider applicants with a diploma from online education. At the same time, employers’ confidence in distance learning in higher education is lower than in vocational secondary education. Additionally, the majority of institutions of higher education (62.5%) believe in the possibility of using distance education in the Russian Arctic, while organizations of vocational secondary education (64.98%) have the opposite opinion. Based on the results of the study, recommendations for federal and regional authorities were prepared.