Rada V. Vorushilova

The relevance of the topic is determined by the scale of digital transformation. The object of the study is digital innovation in higher education, and the subject is its methodological and pedagogical support. The aim of the study is to identify unhealthy trends in the digitalization of education, and its objectives are to analyze populist and utopian views on the prospects for cyber pedagogy. The article summarizes the authors' personal observations and the experience of the teaching community. Priority is given to a systematic approach and a method of concretization, which make the identification of populist tendencies in cyber pedagogy more transparent. The topic is covered from a worldview perspective. The study reveals a number of internal contradictions in the digital paradigm, which give reason to consider the concept of cyber pedagogy as utopian one. In particular: 1) the promotion of progress and the emphasis on the immediate wow effect produced by counters built into Internet services; 2) the emphasis on creative collaboration and the reality of an ‘academic vacuum,’ a virtual environment instead of an intellectual environment; 3) the declaration of the individualization of education and continuous typing, the development of patterns, models, and standards; 4) the primacy of learning feasibility and the promise of a technological breakthrough; 5) arguments about strategic proactivity and references to temporal and a priori spontaneous market processes; 6) replacing pedagogy with digital methods of accounting and control; 7) confusing the concepts of awareness and education, scholarship and content; 8) gamification and denial of the need for effort to master the sciences; 9) emphasis on the automatic transfer of knowledge and appeal to the charisma of the teacher in developing students' critical thinking; 10) agile focus on the minimum necessary at the expense of the excessiveness of a creative approach, which is particularly evident in the mechanistic assessment of knowledge; 11) declaration of the right to choose an educational trajectory and, in fact, total predetermination, exacerbated by the widespread introduction of neural networks into educational practice. Thus, the authors see the problem not in technical limitations, but in the ideological inconsistency and groundlessness of cybergogy's claims to be the driver of progress. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that the stated topic has not been directly addressed before. The theoretical significance of the work is determined by its methodological message: to form an opinion about the real prospects of cybergogy. The practical significance lies in identifying the internal contradictions of digital education that hinder the implementation of the pedagogical process.