Abstract:

Engineering education has been and will continue to be vital in everyday life of people around the real world, and students must have key competences to keep up with the speed of innovation in production sphere. The main aims of the paper are focused on setting up platform for Hybrid Education Concept, integration of virtual tools into didactic cycle, learning content and support the students learning experiences for an effective transfer of knowledge into the actual environment of the European labour market challenges. Even before COVID-19, there was growing demand among both faculty and students to create a more flexible and personalized learning experience in key competences development that enabled students to access learning content in a hybrid education concept. Based on the framework, a set of virtual tools and simulation-driven support that allow this hybrid education platform to run smoothly, were implemented. The implementation of a new Hybrid Education Concept (HEC) has proven an effective learning environment to work well as a method for elevating key career-ready engineering competences. The main benefit of the study is the new insight into students´ competences growth based engineering knowledge scaffold with significant findings and recommendations. The innovative hybrid concept is based on compatible hardware modules, virtual instrumentation software and simulation-driven innovation support with the new assessment to identify and reflect on the students´ competences outcomes of learning experiences during didactic cycle to examine the hybrid environment helpfulness of virtual tools and simulation driven learning and to explore how the concept enhances career-ready competences growth. This contribution discusses the findings and experiences gained from the hybrid education concept which was piloted with a producer of virtual instrumentation modules. The paper brings the results of the current national educational agency research project focused on effectiveness of hybrid education concept with virtual instrumentation technologies, small didactic forms and active learning methods in student-focused concept through the processing of instructors and students survey data of the electronics and autotronics study programs from the period of 2018 - 2020. The survey found that the use of hybrid education concept with the enhanced active learning techniques such as promoting interaction among students, getting students to work and collaborate together and pushing students to apply what they are learning, has a positive impact on how students use their learning experiences. Finally, the article brings a summary of the benefits and recommendations to expand the areas of utilization of project findings in wide educational applications and to form forecasts to improve the key competences of engineering faculty’s students through innovative hybrid educational environment support.

Keywords:

Hybrid education platform, virtual design instruments, modelling, simulation, key competences, higher education didactics.