UNIVERSITY NETWORKS AS A NEW VECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATION

The article focusses on the problem of interuniversity cooperation in the context of globalization processes in the educational sphere. Internationalization of modern education, the blotting out of national frontiers in the wake of information technologies development, active expansion of integrational processes in humanity and educational spheres in many regions of the world raise new challenges and problems before national educational systems which are represented by universities and colleges at the top level. Competition in modern education makes universities from different countries unite which is the necessary condition for obtaining a bigger resource base for conducting a large scale scientific research. Latently a new ground of original global thinking independent from national governments is being formed. The integration of universities into international university complexes, university networks, on the one hand extends their opportunities of conducting scientific activity, on the other hand it entails a number of practical problems on working out a single strategy of development and unified educational standards, the latter involves the problem of bringing their activity to conformity with national legal principles. The authors note that interuniversity cooperation, joint educational theoretical projects which are becoming more and more multi-faceted and various promote converting educational systems into supranational ones fulfilling an important humanist role in arranging close cross-cultural communication. The authors scrutinize the projects from different university networks marking common and diverse items and pointing out future ways of this relatively new phenomenon development. A special accent is given to the analysis of the post-Soviet states experience in this sphere.