The Learning Environment As Service To Support Educational Programme

Abstract

To leading universities, with their human resources potential it is necessary to develop next-generation Learning Management System that provides special items of the comfortable education environment for students and teachers. The task to find the ways for realize statements CDIO is most important when to create comfortable Information & learning Environment, that is based on the principles of conversation and interaction between student and teacher. The knowledge, learning content and the net interpersonal communication are e-learning facilities for formal and informal interaction between members of educational process. Such system has to be based on the experience of communication in social media. On the other hand, the competence approach presupposes to use up-to-date pedagogical methods that are of great meaningful for personal development education. The new educational conditions are context where competences are developing. Information & Learning Environment for students and teachers were designed in accordance with the theory and the practice of social network connectivity. The model has allowed it possible to compile information flows dynamic database of teaching materials and the educational documentation. System provides not only consulting interaction the teacher – the student – Institute’s methodical but also implements serious pedagogical tasks. Such approach allows organizing virtual education overview mode of laboratories, offers an opportunity works in virtual space, setting thus conditions for modeling of situations. The synergy of mobile and remote training contains huge potential of development of educational services.

Keywords: Learning Environment,personal development educationNetwork communicationMOOCs

Introduction

Information & Learning Environment implementation to leading universities demands of such educational process model, wherein teacher’s professional and student’s cognitive activity are transferred from real space of university buildings to virtual informational space. Appearance of the personal computer and access to the Internet has introduced into the education not only the new technical butdidactic possibilities, such as simplicity of the interaction, access to the global information and visualization of the processes.

Knowledge is turning to the structured products in the new mobility educational environment. This knowledge is very flexible and can provide the students to choose content, period, place and time training. Such knowledge is well corresponding to the different educational style and can to encourage students and teachers creativity.

The existing Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Blackboard, learning Space, or Prometheus, are based on the averaged model of the educational institution and they are insufficient to innovative research universities. The open architecture of MOODLE or Sakai is more flexible, but it has limitation in terms of integrating and using of different services and databases.

On the other hand widespread occurrence of MOOC platforms and courses placed on them is very impressive, for example, Google and EdX cooperate in developing an open source platform (Open EdX) and site for online training MOOC.org. EdX, Coursera, UDACITY, Udemy and others offer courses independent of or in collaboration with universities. The phenomena of MOOCs is connected with placing them in the wider context of open education and the changes that are currently taking place in higher education (Yuan, & Powell, 2013).

Students’ motivations to study different courses using MOOCs may be range on four categories (Yuan & Powell, 2013):

• To support lifelong learning.

• To get social experience and intellectual simulation.

• To overcome barriers of traditional education.

To experience or explore online education.

Problem Statement

Higher education has faced such global challenges as new literacy and, without a doubt, for leading universities with their human resources potential it is necessary to find the best approach that can provide special items of comfortable education environment for students and teachers. We need to understand demands of our students who would like to have less traditional lecturing and more guided opportunities for learners. The different ICTs are central technologies for literacy within the global community in an information age (Armstrong, 2009).

The task to find the ways for realize statements CDIO is most important when to create comfortable Information & learning Environment, that is based on the principles of conversation and interaction between student and teacher.

Research Questions

The new educational conditions are context where competences are developing. The knowledge, learning content and the net interpersonal communication are e-learning facilities for formal and informal interaction between members of educational process. Up-to-date transfer of individual activity to Internet allows realizing and developing Information & Learning Environment for students and teachers by adaptation services of social media to teaching with using distance educational technology.

Thus, the educational networks can consider as permanently developing internal structures. Students can get necessary competences when they use obtained knowledge to solve professional practice tasks of different levels. Tasks have to be described such as situational statement and request for students to make right decision. The main questions are old and new at the same time: for students - how to get the best competences, for teachers - how to design such courses and bring best knowledge for wide audience. So we need to understand two things:

• How to create the person, capable to self-evolution and adaptation when changed technological, social and economic conditions.

• How to develop educational environment to create the person, described before.

Purpose of the Study

For modern education in general and for technical universities in particular it is very important to create the person, capable to self-evolution and adaptation when changed technological, social and economic conditions, so the purpose is to overcome barriers in learning of engineering sciences and to find appropriate configuration of the Smart Learning Management System in accordance with the update statements of goal CDIO for engineering educational process.

Research Methods

Information & Learning Environment for students and teachers should be designed on the experience of communication in social media and in accordance with the theory and the practice of social network connectivity. The proceeding in the field of the theory of connectivism, a ‘cognitivist’ theory (Armstrong, 2009;Zeer, 2006; Siemens, 2011) of knowledge and learning, experience that is based on conversation and interaction, on sharing, creation and participation in social network and professional community such as Facebook, eLearningPro, OpenClass – all these are the scientific base to create successful personal e-learning environment. Consequently it was possible to solve tasks by using social software in accordance with the main ideas of Web 3.0 concept (Silva, MahfujurRahman& El Saddik, 2008), (Yen et al., 2015):

• using web-services in general (social networks, blogs, forums, wiki-pages, tags, tabs etc.),

• distributed resources using,

• forming of societies, supporting of communication and new conversances,

• using “group mind” to develop social services,

• transforming of the user’s role from passive reader to creator of content (knowledge),

• getting the system of information by using key words (tags),

• using of special technical facilities (RSS, Atom for content syndication; technologies AJAX, mash-up).

Properly the features for Learning Environment and Learning Management System (LMS) should be formed in accordance with (Harvey, 2013):

• pedagogical design of training course,

• interaction activity between teacher and student,

• procuring of necessary knowledge,

• learning result of assessment

• and other activity during formal and informal learning.

Findings

Tomsk Polytechnic University has developed student-centered model of Information & Learning Environment for cooperation between students and teachers on the base of the communication practice of social networks. The main way to reach objective is the pedagogical design of the Smart Learning Management System in accordance with the update statements of goal CDIO for engineering educational process. Implementation of system gives to the university the ample opportunities to raise to a qualitatively new level of education. Right now that system is not only order of the day buta vital necessity.

Conclusion

The modern students feel themselves comfortable in virtual space and they are the active users of the new multimedia products. Information and communication technologies become essential parts of their life. It is the main task for university when Information & Learning Environment is created to use contemporary information technologies. It will allow making academic process not only comfortable and available, but really fascinating for all students. E-learning environment opens for teachers rich possibilities to use new creative methods in modules training.

Except direct effect as support of teachers with e-learning environment and academic services, Smart LMS provides common professional development for university’ scientific and educational personnel because of in new conditions teachers’ communicative competence is growing, personal innovative methodical system is forming, teacher’s self-expression is ensuring.

Finally all these promote growing of human capital of university and country.

Acknowledgments

The authors express gratitude to the Russian Humanitarian Scientific Foundation for supporting this work by the grant RHSF 15-16-70004.

References

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