COOPERATION WITH PRACTICE AS A SUPPORT OF EDUCATION AND RESEARCH AT UNIVERSITIES

From June until September 2011, INEKO in cooperation with Enterpreneurship alliance of Slovakia, American business chamber and Austrian-Slovakian business chamber carried out a survey between the firms operating in Slovakia. The results of analysys showed that the firms in Slovakia are mainly unsatisfied with the quality of graduates. This confirms that the current form of pedagogical approach and pedagogical system are not sufficient for student to acquire necessary skills and knowledge for practice. One of the main problems is absence of practical thinking. Therefore it is desirable to incorporate appropriate forms of pedagogical approach into the contemporary education to effectively achieve objectives with regard to the demand of the society. An appropriate element in the process of improving the quality of university education is intensive cooperation with practise.
This cooperation significantly enriches educational and research activities as it reflects the current need to provide often unique solutions to acute technical problems, accelerates the knowledge transfer and also contributes to funding. It is also a contribution to Lisbon strategy fulfillment.
Civil engineering faculty of the Technical university of Kosice took a part of national project „Universities as the motors of development of knowledgeable society“ realized in Slovakia in years 2013-2015 of which the objective was to adapt the system of academic education to current requirements of the knowledgeable society. The output of the project was detailed recommendation for content and forms of education optimalisation with regards of requirements from the practice including competency model of the graduate. Representatives of the faculty, firms that employ our graduates and graduates themselves all collaborated on the creation of the output material. On the 1st. place out of all required competencies of the graduate the ability to incorporate acquired teoretical and methodological knowledge into the workflow was defined.
The output of in depth analysis carried out by the project team are the following reccomendations for the forms of education and the development of key competencies:
• Teaching by the specialists for the practice,
• Scholarships for students provided by the firms,
• Teaching with the assistance of IT,
• Excursions.
From the above stated results that the adequate method of development of continuous confrontation of aquired knowledge with the practice are also excursions. Well organised excursion could be considered as an instrument of practical education which combines observation and understanding in the real enviroment. The role of excursions is to supplement the teaching in the classroom with the object lesson from the practice and to connect the theory nad practice.
The aim of this entry is to present the excursion as a form of collaboration with practice and as one of the possible and innovative methods of education.