Designing a modern training course in a foreign language for students of technical universities
Authors:   Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University named after N.A. Dobrolyubov, Glumova Elena P. , Zhigalev Boris A. ,   Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University named after N.A. Dobrolyubov, Morozova Maya A. ,   Novosibirsk State Technical University
Published: December 2024

Modern studies of the global and domestic online education market shows that online cost education has exceeded the cost of full-time education in the recent years, and this trend continues to gain momentum. Online education experts according to authoritative at this segment will only gain momentum in the coming years. The domestic online education market according to the data 2023 increased by 17.4%, as evidenced by the volume of investments in the development of online education services, the launch of analogues of foreign online platforms and translation for state funding of distance education. At the same time, universities are far behind the trends that have emerged in modern online education regarding changes in the formats of online courses, the quality of training content and methods for evaluating it, personalization and individualization of online education, etc., universities are still far behind.
Therefore modern approaches to organizing online education and integrating it into university programs in the foreseeable future will remain one of the most relevant and sought-after areas of research interests of both educational technology companies (EdTech companies) and universities. This trend is confirmed by the emergence and rapid increase over the past few years in the numbers of online courses offered by EdTech companies and universities.
At the same time, the latter currently includes only a few domestic universities ranked among the top universities, such as the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, National Research Tomsk State University, University ITMO and some others. Gradually, but quite slowly, the activity of universities in this direction is changing. As analytical studies show, technical universities are the most involved in the development of online courses.
The reasons for the slow involvement of universities at this work includes, on the one hand, the lack of relevant experience among teachers in developing such courses, which is manifested in the complexity and academic nature of the proposed educational product, i.e. marketing unattractiveness of online courses offered by universities, characterized by the “least involving and effective format”, and on the other hand, by the current legislation that restricts the freedom of action of universities.
Within the framework of this study, online resources (electronic educational and methodological complexes and online courses) of leading domestic and foreign developers were analyzed, numbers of scientific and methodological works of university teachers devoted to the design and integration of online foreign language courses for students at the technical areas of training were studied at university programs. Results confirms the relevance of the chosen direction of research.
The currently offered online courses can only partly be integrated into university programs for teaching a foreign language for the numbers of reasons, one of the most significant is the lack of thoughtfulness of the relationship between the stages of training, the sequence and phasing of the process of teaching a foreign language to students of technical areas of training, which entails a low the effectiveness of teaching, as well as the weak motivation of students to learn the foreign language, and latter, It is different for humanitarian students, because it needs special support due through the sociopsychological characteristics of students.
Therefore, the problem of pedagogical design of projected on-line courses and specifics of development of educational content comes to the fore. The factors influencing the effectiveness of solving this problem, according to the authors of the study, are:
- different levels of language training of the first-year students,
- specificity and complexity of professionally directed topics of a foreign language course, associated with the specifics of the particular area of training and specialty of profile,
- socio-psychological characteristics of students of the technical university,
- different step and motivational resources of students in mastering the topics of the course.
In this paper, on the example of personal experience in designing and testing an electronic training course in a foreign (German) language for students of technical universities on the basis of Novosibirsk State Technical University, the specifics of projecting a modern electronic training course in a foreign language for students of technical areas of training are described and the basic parameters of an electronic training course are determined in a foreign language, ensuring the interconnectedness and phased preparation for the study of professionally oriented topics and their further successful assimilation within the framework of a university course of the foreign language.