To the Question of Teaching Staff Readiness to Digital Training

Abstract

The question of teaching staff readiness to digitalize the educational process is considered in this paper. Digital education is a prerequisite for training of specialists meeting the requirements for the XXI century digital economy. There are a number of challenges in introducing digital learning, including those in engineering education. Digitalization of the technical subject area is very costly process that has its own specifics and requires developers to possess not only professional competencies related to a particular discipline, but also to be advanced in the arear of information and communication technologies. Besides modern teaching and laboratory facilities, and computer systems for various purposes, an important condition for promoting of digitization in subject teaching is teaching staff willingness to improve their teaching skills along with fluency in modern digital technologies. As an example of subject teaching, in this paper are considered informatization and digitalization of basic geometric and graphic training for students at technical higher education institutes. The analysis is carried out from the point of view related to preparation of the academic teaching staff for creation and implementation of the educational environment that meets the requirements for dynamically developing design as a type of engineering activity. The scheme for realization of mixed learning has been presented, which introduction is determined by students' individual work implementation, and the process of students' online geometric-graphic training during self-isolation for COVID-19 prevention has been described. An analysis of teacher's activity content increase in the full online training mode has been carried out. Has been presented a set of practical measures acting to raise the chair’s teaching staff qualification and providing readiness to solving urgent problems of students’ learning through the digital educational environment. As a conclusion of the study, it is stated that in digitalization conditions the most successful form for implementing of basic geometric and graphic training is the form of blended learning.