Abstract:

The modern level of food production requires principally new training method for future qualified specialists in engineering of food technologies. Сonsequently, this case requires qualitatively new classical and electronic textbooks, that should correspond to the advanced level of science and technology, and conduct the formation of an engineering culture among students, their deep specialized knowledge, business competencies and a broad professional horizon.

The goal of the study is the development of the didactic conceptual model of textbooks on food engineering, which structural concept promotes the students’ better mastering of the studied material.

The systematic nature of the textbooks is due to the fact that the concept of the system approach is based on the presentations of the materials, when all the objects of a specific interactive system, that go under consideration are food production, its separate stages, processing equipment, and the processed media. Therefore, in the published textbooks there is the most recent information about the advanced technical systems and equipment of relevant industries – this is determined as the avant-garde nature of textbooks. However, in order to know and understand the problems of modern production and to look confidently into the future, it is necessary not only to have reliable theoretical and practical training, but also to rely on the traditions and experience of predecessors.

Given this, another feature of the textbooks is their retrospective nature. In particular, before a sufficiently detailed description of modern designs and principles of the technological equipment functioning, the textbook briefly touches the previous most significant historical stages of their technical development, demonstrating orientation and flight of engineering thought to the student. The main modern production problems, based on the dialectical, scientific, systemic and engineering patterns of development, as well as on possible directions of technical and technological improvement of food production, have been identified and analyzed. This specificity of the textbooks helps the student to navigate in the main technical problems of the industry and purposefully choose the topic of the course or final qualifying work that will have practical significance. The main methods of our research are testing and questioning of student groups, that allowed to evaluate the effectiveness of mastering the material under study, using textbooks created on the basis of a new didactic conceptual model.

Results:
A comparative analysis of the results of the use of textbooks showed that the progress of students using a textbook with a new concept of material presentation increased by 8.2%. At the same time, questioning of students showed that the use of the new textbook is expanding the professional horizon of the students, what helps them to better navigate themselves in the main production problems and consciously choose the topics for course and final qualification works. The concept of textbooks with new didactic features contributes to better assimilation of the study material on food engineering and the selection of new actual topics for students' final works.

Keywords:

New training method, classical and electronic textbooks, business competencies, avant-garde nature of textbook, outstripping education, production development.