TO THE QUESTION ABOUT THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISTANCE LEARNING SYSTEM IN THE RUSSIA

Information and communication technologies have reached the highest level of development today, and it allows us to create a powerful system of distance education - an open information environment that enables you to disseminate knowledge and all sorts of information freely and without dependency on national characteristics and boundaries. Development and dissemination of distance education system gives opportunity to improve Russian education system competitiveness, to ensure broad access to education, to raise our planet inhabitants’ cultural and educational level by promoting Russian education outside the country. The article deals with current issues of distance learning system implementation and development in Russia. The distance learning advantages over traditional form are also viewed in the issue. The distance education role, its increase in the availability and openness, improving graduates quality, educational institution image and ranking growth in the education market, the empowerment of citizens in obtaining continuing education throughout life, educational services quality improving by providing access to information resources, creating conditions and opportunities to improve training, retraining and advanced training of citizens are pointed out in the article. The problems of centralization of distance education system management in Russia and the system interaction processes with country’s separate universities, implementing undergraduate and graduate programmes through distance learning are touched on the issue. A new education information service, coordination of distance learning traditional forms at the national level, coordination of Russian and international programmes in the field of distance education, control over the creation and functioning of the distance education system are required.