ONLINE DISTANCE LANGUAGE LEARNING: EDUCATIONAL AUTONOMY OF STUDENTS
The relevance of the issue of educational autonomy is caused by emergence of open, flexible or online distance learning in higher school. That means a certain liberty in choice of forms, models of education, contents and duration, while pedagogical community has new tasks - not only to provide productive educational process in new conditions, but also to define effective pedagogical approaches, strategies and personal characteristics of students guaranteeing education result. Students’ educational autonomy is one of the major conditions for successful training. For the analysis of the concepts «autonomous education», «autonomous foreign language education» theoretical and empirical methods were used: the analysis of pedagogical literature and methodical documentation concerning the research problem; synthesis of Russian and European pedagogical experience. During the research, the definition of educational autonomy in foreign language learning, personal characteristics of independent learners and the role of a teacher in new conditions the following were defined.