CC BY
14УДК 378.147 ББК 74.480.26
DOI 10.7442/2071-9620-2015-1-122-128
S.A. Belousova
(South Ural State University, Chelyabinsk, Russia)
DESIGNING OF THE CONTENT AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS WHILE TEACHING ELECTIVE DISCIPLINES: WORK EXPERIENCE
The problem of evaluation and testing of approaches to planning the content and technologies of elective course teaching is discussed. The reasons are higher school modernization and different student groups, the necessity to form educational environment in the higher school to provide multivariant development of students as well as their academic and social integration. An algorithm of planning an elective course has developed from experience. The article discusses its main elements: defining the goals and type of the elective course, defining the types of activities to master the selected content; defining the content of student independent work; defining the criteria and indices of course efficiency andforms of summative assessment Keywords: elective courses, education content, education content planning, algorithm of selecting education technologies.
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С.А. Белоусова
(Южно-Уральский государственный университет, г. Челябинск, Россия)
ПРОЕКТИРОВАНИЕ СОДЕРЖАНИЯ И ТЕХНОЛОГИИ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОГО ПРОЦЕССА В УСЛОВИЯХ РЕАЛИЗАЦИИ ЭЛЕКТИВНЫХ КУРСОВ: ИЗ ОПЫТА РАБОТЫ
Рассматривается проблема апробации в опыте подходов к проектированию содержания и технологий реализации элективных курсов. Причины обращения к проблеме в ходе модернизации высшей школы связаны с неоднородностью состава обучающихся, необходимостью формирования в вузе образовательной среды, обеспечивающей многовариантность развития участников образования, академическую и социальную интеграцию студента. Из опыта работы сформировался алгоритм проектирования элективного курса. В статье обсуждаются его основные элементы: определение задач и вида электива, определение видов деятельности по освоению выбранного содержательного материала; определение содержания самостоятельной работы студента; определение критериев и показателей успешности курса и форм итоговой отчетности.
Ключевые слова:элективные курсы, содержание образования, содержание обучения, проектирование содержания образования, алгоритм подбора образовательных технологий.
The problem faced by every student and consisting in the individual learning path choice from the elective disciplines (courses) has been widely discussed recently. The reasons for such focus lie in the great significance and complexity of such problems solution for modernization of the higher education.
Academics of the Russian-British Institute of Management (RBIM) are well aware that students of higher educational institutions are heterogeneous and have different level of student engagement because of their different attitudes towards learning and differences in the existing backgrounds and views on the strategy of their primary professionalization. This requires the development of such educational environment concepts inside the HEI which will make it possible to overcome the non-linearity of the educational environment, ensure a variety and a range of alternative ways of development for education participants, choice of ways of development from a specially formed set of. Meanwhile, student engagement is a dynamic effect of the interaction of the student and the university which creates an additional challenge. Hence, a flexible system of elective courses is one of the conditions for the implementation of the synergetic development principles inside the institutional environment of a HEI [7; 9; 12; 13].
The second aspect that gives the special value to elective disciplines in contemporary professional education, relates, of course, to the competency paradigm. Competency (expertise) is interpreted by the contemporary literature as a general ability to solve problems that arise in real life situations, using the knowledge, training and life experience, and human values. Such approach focuses on those educational technologies' characteristics as the recognition of student subjectivity and the right to participate in goal setting, recognition of the pedagogical situation as an essential element of a modern educational technology and recognition of the probabilistic nature of any pedagogical
situation. Implementation of the competency approach in a HEI involves setting a number of new tasks, for example, ensuring the academic and social integration of the student for the time he/she have already studied a HEI (as a mechanism promoting student success) [6], creation of conditions for the manifestation of respect to the diverse talents of students and their preferred ways of learning (in the transference of high expectations precisely to these personal manifestations) [3]. Elective disciplines as educational practices are the most suitable for addressing such issues.
Meanwhile, this educational practice is still in the process of its development. Few existing recommendations are descriptive in their nature and hardly can be used as explanatory documents in future, so it is important that every teacher forms his/ her own concept for designing the content and technology in the educational process of an elective discipline. This article proposes some approaches to designing the content and implementation technologies of elective disciplines that were proved by our experience as well as discusses the problems to be resolved.
Elective disciplines (Lat. Electus-selected) are courses mandatory for attending which are selected by learners and are implemented by means of HEI curriculum components. The Russian-British Institute of Management has a range of elective disciplines offered by the departments of the university each semester, and students can choose the ones that meet their interests and help to explore more deeply other "mandatory" subjects thereby using the possibility of independent creation of individual learning paths. RBIM resolved the issue of the organization of educational process in the framework of elective disciplines and of student progress monitoring quite successfully, the inconsistency between fixed terms of training and separation of students into academic streams and groups on elective courses has been settled, approaches are being developed for the formation of elective
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disciplines' contents in accordance with the selected major and specialization starting from the first years of study.
While modeling the educational process, the teacher must understand the aims of the elective disciplines which are the following: fill in the gaps of school training; complement the basic training course material to expand its contents and make it more profound; develop the content of one of the common cultural area or professional study course that allow to maintain student interest in the chosen subject; contribute to a common cultural competency which ensures student readiness for self-actualization and further active study of other subjects in the speciality, future management activities, as well as professional mobility under the new social and economic conditions; promote the student project activity oriented at future profession; respond to the real needs of employers thus solving issues of future specialists' employment; contribute to satisfying of student cognitive interests in different professions and others. Determination of priorities (based on the analysis of the actual educational situation, as well as personal and professional preferences) allows the teacher to determine the type of the planned elective discipline- whether it will make the course more "profound" (helping students to further study any section or sections of basic disciplines) or will it be some "corrective" course (supporting students who for some reasons decided to change the professional training major or have gaps of knowledge in the chosen subject), "general cultural" course (designed to develop a common outlook, improving the cultural level of the students), or "career guidance" course (helping students to feel comfortable with different issues of the future profession) [9; 13].
Thus, the study of the interests and needs of student groups (it was revealed that ambitious young leaders long for entering in the business life of the city and the region, they are willing to take on new projects and demonstrate a special interest to the information mediation, etc.) brought us an understanding of how significant the
elective discipline "Investment Agency" is for student self-actualization. The discipline content is an advanced and more profound version of the several sections of some basic disciplines ("Management, "Financial Management", "State and Municipal Management", "Mathematical Methods of Decision Making", etc.); the introduction of a number of specializations corresponding to the management education major (manager of investor relations (IR), public relations specialist (PR), a financial analyst, etc.); a total of parts from different sections of several subjects as the discipline is focused on a certain level of generalization (e.g., mathematical statistics, research methods of control systems) and the development of certain activities (e.g., preparation for work analytical tools to analyze the investment attractiveness of the municipal entities, the implementation of a media -projects etc.). At the same time, we shall note that the discussed elective discipline is an applied one, and it is aimed at student familiarization with the most important ways and methods of applying knowledge in practice, the development of student interest in modern management systems, provision of professional communication with business representatives and municipal government. It is important that it is a course dedicated to the study of problem-solving methods (mathematical, financial, analytical, forecasting, designing, psychological, etc.) [1; 2; 5; 11].
The teacher further determines which information will be used for resolving of disciplines tasks, in fact, it means choice of possible student activities. To solve this problem, we rely on a number of approaches to the creation of elective disciplines.
First approach to elective courses designing that we selected is characterized by grouping of chosen contents around a number of key concepts that have a uniform significance for the management of science and practice: the needs of the target audience, management functions, efficiency of business systems, evidence-based methods, etc. This approach is chosen
due to its intersubject nature of the designed discipline and is based on different sciences that consider one problem, the phenomenon, the concept from different points of view. This approach is preferable for the use of reflective learning technologies, critical thinking, case-method, etc.
The second efficient approach that we provisionally called pragmatic involves the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills providing the basic professional and cultural level of the students and being widely used further in life: the ability to coordinate their actions with those of the other participants during the common activity, the ability to plan their activity, to overcome difficulties, etc.
This approach may be better implemented in the form of practical classes, a series of workshops in a particular professional field.
The third approach - focused on the activity and the value - stipulates student familiarization with the kinds of activities necessary for the successful acquirement of one or another problem solution. At the same time, we note that there is some relationship between the rational selection of ways to perform the activity and forms of educational process organization, on the one hand, and the ability and inclinations of students - on the other hand. Thus, the preferred form of the training organization for some students is a cooperative and distributed activity, for others - a cooperative and sequenced activity and only few are able to cope with truly collaborative activities, where they are ready to take any desired group roles and implement them efficiently [8; 10; 12].
By using all three approaches outlined above were able to identify two modules in the elective discipline discussed as an example. The first module stipulated: familiarization with the IR-occupation, profession of the investment analyst, with IR-company representatives; familiarization with the way the investors formulate their own system of requirements and criteria to answer the question of where, how much, and under what terms they are willing to invest, including investment funds
declarations; study (formation) to document understanding of criteria systems criteria of investors in the relevant databases; study methods of communication the capital market situations by the IR-specialist to the management; market research for investment; development of investment instruments; roadshow preparation on the basis of the financial statements; study and development of media platforms opportunities as a channel of communication with the broad business audience, and others. The second module stipulated: development of a tool for assessing the investment attractiveness of municipal entities; appropriate analysis conduction and making an investment attractiveness rating of municipal entities in the Chelyabinsk region; production and performance of expert procedures in respect of established tools and databases.
During the next stage we think it is important to evaluate the extent of student independence and how it manifests itself. Thus, in the framework of an elective discipline "Investment Agency" students can participate in the choice of contents for each module, including determining of the ambitions level in terms of the planned result; identify institutional investors and analyze databases of investment funds, build and implement the scheme for work with them; formulate the problem of information mediation tasks and study alternative ways of such service delivering, practice in the creation of services, organize expert evaluation of the solutions made, etc.
Already at the design stage it is crucial to determine the criteria for the success of the discipline, including the interest dynamics, as well as the methods to obtain relevant information. In our opinion, the system of elective disciplines should be evaluated according to the degree of student engagement in the educational processes [2]. Furthermore, academic engagement is expressed through the amount of effort that students spend on educational activities performed to achieve the educational goals. The experience shows that a well-formed elective discipline (in fact, an appropriately
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chosen as well) provides a manifold increase of such efforts which manifests itself in increasing of the time spent by students on homework, taking the lead in the educational objectives shaping and their implementation methods, increasing of complexity of voluntarily undertaken commitments to find and process the needed information, etc.
Social engagement is characterized by the integration of students in the institute's community, involvement in relationships with other students, teachers, organizations, officials. As the author observed, a successful elective discipline may lead to voluntary participation in a variety of activities: preparing articles for publishing, participation in student scientific conferences, forums, business community and others.
We believe that the form of final reporting reasonable for many tasks of elective courses is the final conference with an accompanying exhibition of works made by students, public presentation of the results of their work in a HEI or beyond it (competitions, reviews, publications, etc.).
It is important to pay special attention to the technology of choice of an elective discipline. "The moment of choice is the moment of the truth. This is a test for our character and competency" [1, p. 159]. RBIM is well aware that the choice of elective disciplines by the students is a complex organizational problem. Its solution can be prevented by such factors as urgency (urgent cases); social mirror (what is approved and encouraged by others); own expectations and those of others; deep and the current values (what the person believes it is important in the long or short term); fundamental needs and immediate desires and others. An important factor is the level of self-consciousness of the student. Technological problems to be solved by the teacher at the stage of organizing students for choosing the courses proposed are related to the creation of conditions for recognition of inefficiency both of intrusion and uncritical acceptance of ways of development, understanding of the importance of efforts to reveal own
development trends; understanding of the importance of improvisation (readiness to act consciously and responsibly in the situations what improvisation is necessary), intuition and the ability to change the whole scenario of their training in the exercising of the freedom to choose individual learning paths.
Since the practice of implementation of elective disciplines only develops, we would like to stress urgent, in our opinion, tasks of this HEI's curriculum element development: the prevention of violations of specialization and student major training; problems of duplication of the basic subjects content within the elective courses and in other elective disciplines; search for mechanisms of thematic and temporary coordination of elective courses with basic academic subjects; practicing approval procedures (expert examination) for elective courses.
Finally, let us note that the technology of elective disciplines development for students of management disciplines, understanding thei r role in the teachi ng-learni ng proces s and teaching methods require a generalization of experience of the various HEI's departments. References:
1. Belousova S.A, Modeling the Way How Management Students Master the Competences of Personal and Professional Self-Development. Contemporary Higher Education: Innovative Aspects. 2014. № 1. p. 4-9. [in Russian]
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to form manager project competence. Chelyabinsk, RBIM, 2014 [in Russian]
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Поступила 18.02.2015
About the author:
Belousova Svetlana Anatolievna, Professor, Department of Developmental Psychology, Sout Ural State University (76, Lenin Avenue, Chelyabinsk, Russia) Doctor of Sciences (Psychology), belousova.s.a@rbiu.ru
For citation: Belousova S.A. Designing of the Content and the Technology of the Educational Process While Teaching Elective Disciplines: Work Experience // Contemporary Higher n Education: Innovative Aspects. 2015. № 1. Р. 122-128
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Об авторе:
Белоусова Светлана Анатольевна, профессор кафедры психологии развития ФГБОУ ВПО «Южно-Уральский государственный университет» (Научно-исследовательский университет) (Россия, г. Челябинск, проспект Ленина, д. 76), доктор психологических наук, доцент, belousova.s.a@rbiu.ru
Для цитирования: Белоусова С.А. Проектирование содержания и технологии образовательного процесса в условиях реализации элективных курсов: из опыта работы // Современная высшая школа: инновационный аспект. 2015. № 1. С. 122-128
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