Abstract:

Ukraine's higher education system is gradually being reformed, moving towards integration into the European space, but the ongoing crisis significantly hinders such reforms. The Ukrainian higher education institutions (HEIs) are currently experiencing a durable multidimensional crisis. Having not fully recovered from the negative consequences of the pandemic and the post-pandemic crisis, HEIs plunged into even more difficult conditions for conducting educational activities due to the full-scale aggressive war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in February 2022. Though extreme conditions put all participants in the educational process on the verge of survival, causing stress, emotional instability, enforced relocations, and destruction of educational infrastructure, they also offered unique learning experiences for students and teaching for academic staff to further develop remote work and education activities. The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of students and teachers on the special conditions of the educational process during a full-scale war, with a focus on the attitudes toward the organization of learning and the digitalization of the educational process. The anonymous online survey (teachers=55; students=450) was conducted immediately after the end of the academic year (June-July 2023) at a public HEI in the Kharkiv region. The findings show that in the context of the ongoing crisis in the education system, which has deepened as a result of military aggression, students and teachers unanimously choose to organize the educational process in an online format, despite the fact that a little more than a quarter of respondents consider this form of education to be the most effective in the long term. A significant conclusion of the study is the coherence of the opinions of the participants in the educational process regarding its organization in a combined format, i.e. a combination of online and offline formats. The results of the analysis of primary information also made it possible to determine that the ongoing crisis has significantly improved the level of digitalization of higher education institutions, as evidenced by the high level of technical equipment of the university in distance learning, both teachers and students are quite satisfied with the quality of communication platforms, content and quality of educational content.