Abstract:

The paper is aimed at effective flexible digital educational environment for technical education at technological faculties concentrated on the support of development of key competences of graduates of technical faculties by means of massive technological support directed at synergy of components of knowledge base and its integration with competences of graduates of technical study fields in an actual working environment. The University of Zilina (Slovakia), and Culture and Education Grant Agency (Slovakia), share the idea of how engineering students’ education creates a path to success for its workforce, and how technology-oriented programs can fulfill its mission, too. The supported research works presented in this paper are concentrated to the new structures of state and faculty educational programs, study plans, curriculum changes made based upon students key competences and the professional profiles derived from the studies to create the didactics of flexible education concept in which the engineering educational environment works effectively. The current study was conducted in the Department of Mechatronics and Electronics. The sample for this study consists of 106 students’ data from 9 experimental groups of a technology preparation program in the period of 2017-2018. They are classified as “progressive and perspective,” as this preparation program is very selective and demands high score. The objectives of the research were to find which learning styles are preferred by most students, and how individual student’s learning style on experimental group of respondents’ works, and to investigate the influence of new educational technology support concept in selected subjects accepting individual student’s learning style through an analytical separation of dichotomy learning styles derived from the Felder-Silverman theory. The paper results indicate the distribution of learning styles of students, which creates the possibility of feedback to improve the educational process by focusing on the appropriate selection of organizational and didactic forms, teaching methods, teaching principles and educational technology (tutorials, textbooks, slides design, dynamic projection, internet, multimedia) to streamline the learning process with a focus on extended development of technology faculty graduates key competences for the 21st century. However, the implementation of new educational technologies has been occurring at such a rapid pace that pedagogical theories and research has been unable to keep up. The paper goals can contribute to formulate qualitative recommendations for the studied target groups of students and classified categories of learning styles, which could serve the teacher creative approach to the didactics of technology subjects, effectively fulfill the objectives related to the development of education programs with a particular focus on the individualization of learning and effective development of each student´s key competencies respecting the specificity of the individual learning style. Finally, results provide evidence that individual learning style does play an important role in students’ occupational commitment, call into question pervasive stereotypes in the Slovakia of students as unambitious, and suggest ways academically elite students might be able to shift the ways they think about their learning styles at study works in order to sustain themselves in the perspective position in future job position.

Keywords:

Educational innovation, flexible environment, learning styles, technical study, didactics, key competences.