Virtual Education Environment: The Support of Students Creativity, Flexibility, Activity

Engineering education has been and will continue to be vital in everyday life of people around the real world, but students must have competences in development of creativity, flexibility and activity, to keep up with the speed of innovations. The experts say flexibility is more important than specific skills. The paper is focused on effective flexible environment for engineering education at technical faculties. The main aim of the article relates to the setting up of flexible educational environment, the integration of the learning content and the support of effective transfer of knowledge into the actual environment of the European working market challenges. The research works respond to the outputs of the National Project "Key Competences Formation and Effective Support of Students Mobility at Technology Faculties" in the context of massive amount of active researchers who work and use knowledge and technology base for this paper. It is also in intention of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Zilina, Slovakia, through the knowledge obtained from project research to offer each interested educational institutions the opportunity to adopt virtual education environment concept to support students creativity, flexibility, activity (CFA) in order to better focus on improving student ´s learning procedure and increasing the quality of instruction procedure. The underlying basis for the research of the effectiveness of the virtual learning environment the paper CFA concept and methodology respect natural principles that while research experts take to account that the students “archetype” behind learning procedure has not changed importantly over time, the external factors affecting how student comprehend, retain and receive new education material are constantly evolving. The paper brings the results of the current national educational agency research project focused on effectiveness of modular didactic cycle with new virtual technologies, methods and forms in student-focused concept through the processing of experimental data of the electronics study program from the period of 2017-2018. Based on the framework, a set of virtual tools and supports that allow this flexible education process to run smoothly, were implemented. The innovative concept is based on standardized automated equipment and virtual instrumentation software with the new assessment to identify and reflect on the students´ competences outcomes of learning experiences during modular didactic cycle to examine the flexible environment helpfulness of virtual instrumentation based learning and to explore how the concept enhances career-ready competences. Finally, this paper discusses the findings and experiences gained from the effective virtual education environment model which was piloted with a multinational company that is a producer of automated equipment and virtual instrumentation software.