Programme Academic Supervisor: The Role, Functions, Efficiency. Case Study

Russian higher education is a turbulent environment. Nowadays, its main challenges are reducing government funding, integrating Russian universities into the international system of higher education, and changing the structure of competition for teachers and students within the global market. These modern trends are complemented by such factors as the transition to the Bologna process and a significant change in the format of bachelor and master degree studies. Moreover, the educational process intensively involves employers who increasingly demand to prepare «ready-to-work» graduates. These demands also impose certain duties on universities. One more additional challenge of modern higher education is a change in the requirements on professors, who have to combine teaching with research beyond just reproducing other people’s ideas to a student. Not less significantly does the format of teaching change due to modern technologies introduction, educational process informatization, and active online courses or «blended learning» involvement in the educational process. All these changes should be taken into account, as far as the activities of the educational institution are concerned. This article studies an academic supervisor of an educational programme’s organizational culture, leadership, and behavioural skills. The research is based on the analysis of the activities of 77 academic supervisors from the Higher School of Economics (HSE), this number including the supervisors of undergraduate and graduate educational programmes. The analysis covered 34.5 % of the total number of programmes (today, 72 undergraduate and 151 graduate programmes are being implemented in HSE). Since 2014, the Higher School of Economics has been using a model of supervisor-headed educational programmes. However, the supervisor’s functions are not documentarily specified, and every supervisor most likely understands them in his/her own way. Accordingly, the purpose of the study is to assess the practice of introducing academic supervisorship of educational programmes on the example of the Higher School of Economics, to identify its problems, and to determine the role models of academic supervisors based on the model of integrated competing values. Within the article, the latter model for working out the role model of an academic supervisor of an educational programme has been conceptualized, based on the study of his/her functionality, resource support, and degree of involvement in management processes.