VIPSKILLS - VIRTUAL AND INTENSIVE COURSE DEVELOPING PRACTICAL SKILLS OF FUTURE ENGINEERS

Nowadays, an international and multidisciplinary cooperation looms large in the Higher Education Institutions. This paper presents our experiences and results of analysis conducted on two groups of students during VIPSKILLS summer schools. Each edition included 2-weeks intensive course in Poland, 2 weeks of e-learning and 2 weeks of face-to-face classes in Spain, organized for 24 students from Poland, Spain and Lithuania. Students came from different faculties and specializations, including Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering and Energy. Participants were divided into 3-person groups to ensure an international and multidisciplinary learning environment to improve both engineering, language and personal competences, gain new perspectives on the energy sources and systems. The optimal number of students was estimated taking into account an equipment in our laboratories and computer rooms. Students worked on their team projects under supervision of teachers from three countries and trainers from companies and professional organizations supporting our project.

First and third parts consisted of a combination of face-to-face teaching forms as: lectures, workshops, seminars, case studies, laboratories etc. As described in The National Education Technology Plan (Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, 2010) it is necessary to create new cost-effective strategies to improve learning outcomes, embrace innovation, continuous improvements and leverage technology to provide engaging and powerful learning experiences. We also visited enterprises, organized meetings with the engineers who have an extensive experience etc. to highlight connections between learning and the real world. To improve ICT skill’s students used different software during their work. Supervisors were responsible for ensuring a balance between computer intervention and human thinking because students must be actively involved in progressing their understanding instead of simply relying on machine guidance. It is a quite common problem, as shown our meetings with enterprises and was confirmed in NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition. Second part of Blended Mobility was a distance learning part. Students used e-learning distributed from a platform on the Educational Portal, included multimedia presentations, tests, e-labs, examples of calculations, chats in groups of international students preparing group projects and consultations with supervisors. Results of our analysis showed strengths and weaknesses of our summer course and main skills that could be improved after participation in it. In conclusion, we deduce further perspectives of our summer school improvements with regard to our findings.