Is the infrastructure of regional universities ready to meet the challenges of digital transformation?

The processes of informatization, digitalization, and digital transformation of education have led to large-scale changes that have affected almost all elements of the educational system – from pedagogical concepts and technologies to the structures of new types («digital universities», «smart campuses», etc.). The creation of such structures is based on the universities’ IT-infrastructure, the requirements for the latter to be determined by the modern problems challenging the higher education system. The development of the IT-infrastructure became particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when there appeared the necessity of an urgent transition to electronic forms of education, including the mass delivery of electronic content to students. This problem was most acute for regional universities, whose own resources were not always sufficient to solve it. The purpose of this research article is to analyze the dynamics of the universities’ IT-infrastructure 2015–2020 development in the Sverdlovsk region as the basis for their digitalization and digital transformation. The choice of the Sverdlovsk region is explained by the fact that among the subjects of the Russian Federation, it occupies one of the leading positions by the number of universities and the number of students. Within the study, based on 2015–2020 statistical data (the so-called «ВПО-1» and «ВПО-2» forms as filled in by all HEIs), there were analyzed various components of the universities’ IT-infrastructure: the park of personal computers and multimedia facilities; the access to the Internet; the general availability of special software both for the region as a whole and in the context of particular universities. According to our analysis, the period studied saw growth in the information equipment provision for the universities’ non-educational activities, and – at the same time – decrease in the provision of computers used for educational purposes and for the students’ independent work. Along with the positive dynamics of providing the universities with access to high-speed Internet, less than a third of them maintain a maximum speed of over 100 Mbps. The universities are provided mainly with mandatory software tools (electronic library and reference systems, testing systems), whereas the virtual simulators are the least available. Another problem is the obsolescence of universities’ information technology equipment. At the same time, the region continues to see the universities’ differentiation by the level of all the IT-infrastructure components development (hardware, Internet access, software). To solve the problems of digitalization and digital transformation, the universities should assess the IT-infrastructure capacity necessary to solve modern educational and extracurricular tasks according to the interests of external and internal stakeholders (including employees and students of various categories), and more clearly formulate the objectives of modernizing IT-infrastructure in their development programs (strategies). The elimination of the universities’ digital inequality in the regions should be reflected in federal projects concerning the development of higher education. For these purposes, it is necessary to develop a modern methodology for assessing the compliance of the universities’ IT-infrastructure with the requirements of digitalization and digital transformation. Our research is original, as it presents an attempt to analyze the dynamics of the universities’ IT-infrastructure development in the Sverdlovsk region on the basis of statistical data.