IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF DISTANCE LEARNING COURSES IN LATVIA

The scientific interest in distance learning has been formed long time ago. The form of part-time education was in demand also in previous years, and now, in the era of rapid development of telecommunication technologies, special attention is paid to distance learning as a form of part- time education. The academic staffs enhance big expectations on the telecommunications and the Internet resources.
Distance learning as one of the new and perspective forms of completing higher education increases in popularity around the world. The two main factors have led to an explosion of interest in distance learning: the growing need for continual skills upgrading and retraining; and the technological advances that have made it possible to teach more and more subjects at a distance (UNESCO, 2002).
The current trends in the field of distance learning involve the shift in pedagogical prospects and theoretical frameworks, while the cooperation of students underlies the student-oriented constructivist environment (Beldarrain, 2017).
In 2013 the European Commission launched an initiative "to set out a framework for enhancing learning and teaching through new technologies and open digital content at all levels of education." The changing learning and teaching environment encourages higher education institutions to use distance learning tools more intensively (Bierne, Titko, 2016).

Objective:
The main research question of this paper is: the general development trends of the main drivers for attracting more students into – quality distance learning in Latvia. One of the research tasks is to analyze and develop a new scheme that shows the current situation and the future development trends in the distance learning of the higher education. The relevance of the research: the authors review the intersections of the distance learning and it quality as the optimal solutions for the critical situation in the Latvian higher education sector with low of students.

Methods:
The study used a survey of distance learning students at RISEBA University, Riga, Latvia. The survey contained 12 questions to determine the degree of student satisfaction with the quality of distance learning courses. The study was conducted in January 2018, data analysis was conducted in February-March 2018. The number of the evaluated study courses is 171 out of 54 sstudent’s groups, within the framework of 4 programms of bachelor's and master's level. These courses were developed by 47 teachers. Indicators for assessing the quality of training courses - 12 (n1-n12).

Results:
Summing up preliminary studies, it can be argued that the quality of training courses is above average. Data are received from 705 questionnaires of students, which is 57% of the total number of students. Each factor was evaluated on a scale from 0 to 5.
The results identified problematic areas - there are 6 factors that have been evaluated from 3.99 to 4.27, which is not critical for the quality of distance learning courses.

Conclusion:
The results of this study allow us to identify those factors - problem areas in distance learning courses that require improvements. Next, you can create a plan for improving distance learning courses.