Abstract:

Over the last years, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of using innovative approaches to teaching mathematics at schools and higher education institutions. Innovative approaches involve both the use of new teaching methods, learning strategies and new technologies. New technology and online tools that nowadays are widely used in education, have been changing mathematics teaching techniques. Technology makes life easier for both students and educators. The use of contemporary technologies at universities is attractive and motivating to study for a new generation of students, whose life in the media environment and the use of digital technologies on a daily basis has become the norm. Due to information technology, new innovative teaching methods such as flipped and virtual classrooms, mobile learning etc. have been developed. At the same time, classical teaching approaches and methods such as the use of whiteboard-and-pen, methods of repeating and memorizing information, proof of theorems at lessons, and hand-written notes made by students during lessons, are often considered boring and uninspiring for students. The authors pose a question of how reasonable is to forget and principally move away from the classical methods of teaching higher mathematics at technical universities just because it is perceived as less interesting and not entertaining, taking into consideration that the learning process is work but all work requires effort in order to achieve a result.

The main goal of technical universities is to prepare competent specialists capable of professional growth and self-education. Mathematics courses for technical specialities are the basis for studying specialized disciplines. It should provide not only basic skills and the main concepts of mathematics but also should develop logical thinking and problem-solving skills for students, which is essential for their further career development. The authors’ experience of working with students as well as numerous articles appearing recently in the field of educational psychology, shows that excessive digitalization of the teaching-learning process and ignoring classical teaching methods negatively impacts the process of perception of the material by students. All this, together with a current popular tendency to simplify the basic higher mathematics course in order to facilitate the learning process for students, does not allow the achievement of the above-mentioned goals of mathematics courses at technical universities.

In this paper, the authors discuss the need to maintain a relevant balance between innovative contemporary approaches and methods, and classical methods of teaching higher mathematics at technical universities. The study is based on several surveys for students of Riga Technical University (RTU), a survey for RTU mathematics professors and their experience gained during classroom teaching and then remote teaching caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and reviews of articles in psychological sciences.

Keywords:

Higher education, study process, subject mathematics, contemporary technologies.