The Volgograd state technical university, Volgograd, e-mail: [email protected]
The System of higher education and training of highest-qualification level specialists within it define the level of economical and social development of modern society. Nowadays the problem of lower quality of extramural education and the ability of its existence is being discussed.
From our point of view, extramural education has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages would be: extramural education plays important social role – it is one of the means of providing social justice in the society – the possibility of obtaining higher education regardless of location, circs, nationality, and, sometimes, of health condition; the combination of educational and professional activity in accordance with specialty provides for the development of a number of specialist’s personal characteristics such as: the ability to correlate theory and practice, the ability to detect the most common trends of the development of the society, science, and technics in his area of knowledge; motives for students to join the extramural courses are usually determined professionally; the communication between extramural students and their tutors becomes mutually-enriching, especially on higher courses, as feedback between the educational institution employee and a member of real production takes place; governmental spending on education of extramural student are 2-3 times less, that those of the full-time student.
Along with that an organization of extramural education form has its disadvantages: the ability to communicate directly with your tutor is limited by two-session-a-year system; in a number of cases – lack of special educational literature, oriented for a large volume of student’s individual work; the lack of self-organization and individual work skills; insufficient degree of national computerization to introduce modern methods of distant education, especially in locations that are remote from regional centres.
A presence of the described disadvantages does not undermine the need for extramural education form of Volgograd State Technical University (VolgSTU) matriculants, that allow s us to support those who think that extramural education should not be abandoned, and provide its qualitative implementation, new work methods, and knowledge control.
In order to increase the quality of extramural education within our educational institution the education methods [1, 2] that are aimed for more effective individual work of students in both inter-session period and audience work period and interim knowledge examination. Considering the described disadvantages of extramural education form, work with students within the «Calculative Technics» and «Descriptive Geometry» departments is organized according to the following scheme: all contact phone numbers and addresses are placed on a special website that is organized within the University in order to sustain feedback with leading tutors; approaches to self-organization methods have been developed according to different social and material status and location of students, that imply both traditional(educative literature on paper data carriers) and modern forms. Digital educational methodological complexes (DEMC) were developed by deprtment’s author collectives, that contain course programmes, conspectus and lection presentations, methodological recommendations for practical, laboratory, and control works, a list of recommended literature, and also a set of various difficulty tests for control and self-control of students knowledge in his discipline. These educational-methodological are provided with step-by-step instructions and maximum number of illustrations. An access to DEMCs can be obtained in file storage on the website.
As shown by practice, implementation of this method led to the increase in qualitative level of material mastering. Thus, the quality and control of extramural education should be increased instead of its abandoning.