Abstract:

Distance learning, which today is considered as an innovation, even in such subject areas, where extensive experience of virtual education has already been accumulated, is marked by a special degree of novelty in the field of teaching Master's disciplines in linguistics. Of particular relevance to research in this direction is the possibility of transferring the communicative activity concept of learning to the practice of distance learning and modeling on this basis a new educational product using online components and introducing them into the teaching process. Informational-educational environment implies the following interrelated components as the main ones: educational resources, educational communication and educational interaction management. According to this approach, we will explore the problem of creating tools of distance support of teaching the «Theory and Practice of Intercultural Communication» course for master students in linguistics of the specialization in “Theory of mass communications and international public relations”.

This article discusses the educational potencial of the e-learning virtual environment in teaching the intercultural communication and creating on its basis an online educational course for a master’s program. The aim of the project is to transform the taught course into a distance-learning one with the use of innovative information technologies and to actualize it in the educational process. The online educational course on theory and practice of intercultural communication summarizes knowledge about a language as a real and cultural phenomenon and integrates them into a single system, which has to act as a tool of further professional activity. It contains a flexible system of managing students’ knowledge, which is actualized by the development of an online component for organizing students’ independent work on the studied subject.

The developed course is a range of study and methodic materials, which are specially presented as the static element of the course (printed version of the textbook) and the dynamic element of the course (online component) for organizing students’ independent work in the distance form within virtual educational environment. This online course is integrated into the e-learning environment of the virtual Campus and includes the teacher’s web page with information and reference materials, tasks (individual and group), control tasks and tests, and also the student's web page, which includes the documentation of the educational process, teaching materials, forums, web quests and ways of organizing interaction with the teacher.

Materials, which are presented in the virtual Campus, include: presentation of the leading teacher on the main topics of the lecture course; fragments of video lectures, practical lessons for class- and independent work, tests for evaluating master’s students’ abilities and skills, reference materials for the course, links to the open-access educational resources, current publications on the topics in the media, etc. Virtual Campus tools allow uploading presentations prepared by the students on their own, as well as students’ cooperative creation and editing of text and graphic materials on the topic of educational tasks proposed by the teacher.

Keywords:

Theory and practice of intercultural communication, virtual learning environment, master's online educational course.