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In the article there are represented results of generalization and systematization of scientific and practical information about hackathons as an educational technology that is used in higher education and is of great interest to researchers and practitioners. The review has been made on the basis of Russian and foreign scientific publications considering the features of the organization and application of hackathons in the practice of higher education. The authors selected 494 articles issued in the period from 2011 to 2022 in publishings of the RSCI and SCOPUS databases by keywords “hachathon” and “education”, and 83 articles of them were analyzed in this review. It was found that publications about personal experience of participation and organization of hackathons and analytical articles revealing the author’s position on the issues considered in them dominate in the scientific literature on various aspects of hackathons use in the practice of higher education. Empirical studies and scientific reviews are presented to lesser extent. The analysis of publications made it possible to clarify the definition of the term “hackathon”, to identify the types of hackathons most often mentioned in the educational context (pedagogical, educational), and to define the term “educational hackathon”. A content analysis of publications has shown that various aspects of organizing and conducting hackathons in an educational context, their potential and impact on the educational process and its results are the subject of pedagogical discourse. Hackathons as educational intensives have found their application in university educational practice, providing new opportunities for improving the educational process in higher education, as they allow to implement project-, practice- and business-oriented approaches in training specialists. The main prospects of the hackathons use in education are identified and summarized. Introducing educational hackathons in the event plan of an educational organization make it possible to solve educational and career-oriented tasks, activate heuristic and creative cognitive activity of students. The analysis and evaluation of the hackathons impact on professionalization, academic motivation and educational achievements of students are promising areas of research on the problem of using hackathons in the educational process of higher education.

Digitalization of education and the development of electronic pedagogy as a branch of pedagogical science are the conditions that actualize the analysis of online courses application mo-dels which is the purpose of this study. Based on the analysis of scientific pedagogical literature, the article addresses the typology of online courses integration models implemented in the traditional (face-to face) educational process. The author has studied and summarized the various approaches to selecting integration models of online courses in Russian and foreign scientific and pedagogical literature and developed a typology of patterns of online courses application based on three criteria: the organization of the educational process (characteristics: the character of the online course incorporating in the educational process, a way of organizing the educational process), the contents of traditional face-to-face and online components in the learning content (characteristics: a change in the structure of educational process, forms and methods of training), and the organization of interaction between the subjects of the educational process (characteristics: organization of pedagogical support, organization of pedagogical interaction between the subjects). This approach made it possible to pinpoint thirty-four models of online courses application and integration. Each model implemented in practice can be identified unambiguously when typologizing by one characteristic of the corresponding criterion and refer to several types when considering its different characteristics.

The article discusses peculiarities of the customized approach, which takes into account the requirements of specific employers to the process and content of specialists’ training. Since the final consumer of the educational service provided by tertiary educational organization is the employer who hired the graduate, it is necessary to focus on the specifics of a particular organization activity when training specialists. Customized training is based on the collaboration of the University and the partner organization-employer, which consists in coordinating and adjusting educational programs within the existing standards to form professionally significant skills of graduates demanded by the employer, and involves further employment of the graduate in this organization. In this case, the specified organization acts as an investor or co-investor in the training of a future specialist. The employer’s participation in the educational process includes cooperation with the university not only in development of curricula and work programs of disciplines, but also in organization of seminars, conferences, in providing platforms and equipment for students to have their practice and to do their projects in real production conditions while solving actual professional problems. Customized training is one of the mechanisms to solve the problem of overabundance of specialists in some industries and a shortage of highly qualified personnel in others.

One of the areas of the theory and practice in the modern pedagogy is providing conditions and guarantees in socialization and equal access to education for all members of the society including persons with special educational needs. Persons with special educational needs (SEN) are the subjects of inclusion who have atypical features in their development or living conditions. These atypical features may be the cause of uncomplete realization of the right to education. Online courses may be viewed as a resource of inclusive education since they have great potential for educational process organization and implementation for the learners with special educational needs – subjects of inclusion. The paper discusses the possibility and potential benefits of using online courses for different categories of SEN learners. In particular, online courses can serve as instruments of additional pedagogical support in designing student’s individual educational trajectory as well as instruments of socialization.

Online course study is relevant due to their active integration into higher education in Russia and the variety of ways they can be used to implement the concept of life-long education. With the development of e-pedagogy theoretical analysis of online courses as an educational resource becomes a matter of research interest and is the aim of this paper. We analyzed pedagogical scientific works to sum up the characteristic features of online courses, define the term “online course”, break online courses up into groups, describe them as a type or form of education. We suppose online course should be considered as an organized aim-directed educational process based on principles of e-pedagogy and supported by means of modern ICT; a complete, logically and structurally solid educational unit provided with a unique system of electronic means of training resources and means of monitoring. We have worked out a classification of online courses taking the following six criteria: pedagogical approach, interaction of students, period of study, organization, purpose of learning, access to the course. Types of online courses are grouped into categories based on the criteria. The types are catalogued and characterized in the descriptive part of the classification.