?
Типология олимпиадных культур в условиях цифровой трансформации образования
The article examines how digitalization transforms the scale, structure, and typology of the All-Russian School Olympiad by conceptualizing it as an integrated digital environment and a cultural-educational institution. The study aims to use official Olympiad statistical reports for 2023–2025 and an analysis of the Olympiad’s digital infra-structure to describe types of Olympiad cultures at regional and school levels and to show how the digital educational environment simultaneously expands mass participation while reproducing or reshaping existing inequalities. The theoretical and methodological framework combines digital didactics with a cultural approach to education, which makes it possible to treat Olympiad as a symbolic space in which notions of giftedness, academic success, and educational justice are constructed. The digital Olympiad infrastructure is considered as a multi-layered system that includes a unified national portal, regional information systems, online preparatory courses, remote competition rounds, analytical services, and personal accounts with participants’ digital portfolios. The empirical basis consists of official Olympiad statistical data (2019–2025), aggregated by stages, grade levels, regions, and types of educational organisations, and complemented by the authors’ summary tables and calculations of participation rates, selection “funnels,” and the con-centration of winners and prize-winners. The research design combines descriptive statistics, interregional compari-sons, and a stepwise construction of a typology of Olympiad cultures, drawing on quantitative indicators and their cultural interpretation. The findings show that the digital infrastructure facilitates the massification of the school and municipal stages (up to 6.2–7.7 million participants annually) while preserving the selective character of the regional and final stages (approximately 1.8–2.1% and about 0.1% of school-stage participants, respectively). This allows the authors to distinguish three analytical types of Olympiad cultures – institutionalised, transitional, and fragmentary — as well as four value-functional logics of participation: elitist, mass, instrumental, and symbolic. The article proposes a model of the integrated digital environment of Olympiad with three levels of analysis (institutional, pedagogical, and learner level) and a set of measurable indicators for education policy, including regional coverage, participation struc-tures by school type, stability of individual trajectories, and the distribution of prize-winners between “top schools” and the mass segment. The conclusion is that the digitalization of Olympiad creates necessary conditions for expanding access, hybridising preparation formats, and increasing transparency, but, in the absence of targeted policy measures (such as tailoring digital services to different types of Olympiad cultures and supporting mentors and schools outside the elite core), it may simultaneously reinforce territorial and institutional asymmetries and further concentrate preparatory resources and symbolic capital within a narrow circle of “Olympiad ecosystems.”