Teaching to change: the skill to learn, to communicate, and to choose
The article presents an overview of the educational practices in modern university based on comparative analysis of the higher education systems by examples of the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) and elite technical education at the National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University. The present work is focused on the gaps (lacuna) of modern engineering education and emphasizes that the primary objective of the new approach to the training of engineers is learning to change, which is based on the development of competencies. The article notes that the main feature of the new engineering education is the requirement for specialists to have an ability to maneuver in today's ever-changing hightech world. The ability to change, to take and adopt all the new, to modify personal skills and behavior. According to the authors, the engineer must have the ability (and a possibility) to develop creatively in his field. The knowledge obtained by students earlier in the studies of different disciplines can be aggregated and creatively organized with a new objectified information. The approach focuses on the philosophical understanding of knowledge, skills, and abilities that are required to obtain the qualification of an engineer. The authors pay special attention to the necessity to develop teamwork skills of students, which improves the efficiency and the quality of projects in which they are involved. The most effective method is team work in small groups, which is widely employed in UCL. Co-working of the students at UCL is convenient due to auditorium reserve and E-card system of entrance. These conditions allow project groups to meet at any time, and use free auditoriums to discuss, work on the project, or simply share the thoughts. Such a system is currently not available at TPU. This is the main obstacle to joint meetings and team work. Spread of this type of activity among all TPU students can not be done without a radical solution of the problem with the auditoriums. And without resolving the issue with meetings and convenient team work all attempts to introduce problem-oriented, creative, etc. projects will lead to the imitation of team work, without a set of necessary and sufficient competence. In addition, the authors stress the demand to improve the working methods to struggle the plagiarism. According to the authors, promising methods of training to date are the training based on a game method, aimed for both an individual and group assignments, exercises, tasks, and projects. This may be a clue to the puzzle allowing to solve business problems or it could be exercises designed to focus attention, learn a discrete type of mindset, instead of continual mindset (continuous perception of a set of elements) common for most people. This approach allows to teach students to choose, to be attentive to details, to create various combinations of mental constructions, to structure the incoming information.