Abstract:

In the professional education community distance forms of education have become broadly accepted and generally used form of teaching and learning processes. Up to now research of these forms applications have been carried out predominantly focusing on schools and various kinds of educational institutions with intention to transform and modernize commonly used face to face teaching methods to the new ones. The authors of the paper have proposed to implement distance forms of education also in the industrial manufacturing practice for further and life-long learning employees in this sector. Particularly they pay attention to the application of distance forms of education in professional training of control automation systems programmers (programming engineers, specialist technicians). Pilot research of the validation of the idea is going to be done in co-operation with the company EATON. In the pilot research selected EATON experts together with EATON business partners will report on the curricula design of a newly developed distance training course, in particular on its professional content. In this way a high level of acceptation of industrial practice needs in the programmer (specialist technician) vocational training should be reached. From the point of view of education sciences the subject of the research are possibilities and obtained learning outputs of the distance education form applications in the relevant highly specialized and professional training processes. System of distance education forms brings a lot of advantages but at the same time it has also some weaknesses. Despite this fact in the authors` opinion the basic features and specific characteristics of the distance forms of education are of a great potential for a successful and very efficient application of these forms in the area of industrial practice.

Keywords:

Distance education, continuing education, vocational training, control automation systems programmers, industrial practice.