Improvement of higher education: how to bridge the digital divide during the transformation?

The research is focused on a comprehensive analysis of digitalization as a prerequisite for higher education modernization. The authors of this article consider the digital divide as a component of information inequality, which has a technological nature and presupposes unequal opportunities for access, use, and production of information and knowledge or new technologies for their effective use in practice. The authors determined the digital divide is intensifying under pandemic and quarantine restrictions when the preference is given to blended learning technologies, collaborative learning, integrated learning, flipped classroom technology, storytelling, inquiry based learning (IBL), and project based learning (PBL). The research result is a unified information and communication ecosystem developed, which unites the scientific, technological, and educational potential of the network educational digital environment. The ecosystem also provides for the transformation from a lineal to a cluster model of competence cultivation, the formation of digital skills, growth in the volume of information, and creation of digital products.