**1. Introduction**

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Pedagogy, as the science of education, learning and human development, originates from the ideas of Demokrit (460 BC -370 BC), Socrates (469 BC–399 BC), Platon (427 BC -347 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC). Erasmus Rotterdamus (1465 – 1536) is considered the first educator and John Amos Comenius (1592 – 1670) is the founder of didactics. Until recently classical pedagogy has dominated in education. Classical pedagogy based on didactic of John Comenius when a teacher being the bearer of a great volume of systematized information conveys this information to a student and the student has to master this considerable volume of knowledge.

In recent years due to globalization of the world labor market and increased competition in all fields of economics and business, the development of a new system of education has become a very important issue. This new system must respond to challenges of the present and rely on modern pedagogic technologies, up-to-date means of learning process informatization and network models of learning. Starting from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century classical pedagogy has been replaced by pedagogy implementing a new paradigm of education, which is oriented on an individual and meets ideas of humanization in education (Savery &. Duffy, 1995; Jacobson et al, 2006)

Rapid development of the Internet and multimedia has given a strong incentive to the creation of a new pedagogy and new pedagogic technologies. Today one can have the Internet access from anywhere in the world. The use of the Internet and multimedia technologies in education is becoming more and more popular among the majority of population. The advantages of computer- or web-based education over traditional classroom education include the ability to: study while at work, remain in one location with no need to travel; plan own training, attend courses across physical, political, and economic boundaries. In turn, higher education institutions obtain modern educational tools at their disposal. Distance-learning, e-learning and m-learning provide individualized learning, individual oriented approach and humanization of learning.

The modern educational paradigm provides the following important aspects. It requires the establishment of new subject-object relations between students and teachers who are involved in learning process provided that self-directed, personal-oriented and studentcentered teaching methods are used. It becomes necessary to consider pedagogic value and

Distance Learning: Modern Approaches to Engineering Education 151

Fig. 1. The model of the network educational system based on network information

To provide of the Internet-training process organization and its management, a corresponding environment should be created: organizational-administrative maintenance; technical maintenance; methodical maintenance; marketing maintenance; legal maintenance;

The important elements of training process organization are preparation and constant updating of an educational material on a Web-site. It should meet the requirements of selfsufficiency (i.e. to contain all necessary for independent studying), interactivities (i.e. to provide the maximal information interaction between a trainee and an educational institution), availability (i.e. to give an opportunity of access to any available resources), motivation (i.e. to interest a trainee to work with a material), multimedia (i.e. to use the text, figures, sound, animation, video, etc.). All this demands greater time inputs for performing

Development and administrative support of a database plays a significant role because the number of trainees can reach several thousand persons, the number of disciplines can change from several tens up to several hundreds. The duty of the personnel, engaged in training process planning, includes drawing up curricula of courses, schedules of study, timetables of tests and examinations, i.e. preparation of all planning documentation without which a training process is impossible. Preparation of curricula, schedules, timetables can be

functions of the control over preparation and updating of an educational material.

technologies.

**2.2 Learning process maintenance** 

financial-accounting and economic maintenance (fig. 2).

pedagogical usefulness of electronic educational environment. It also requires alterations in information interaction between students and teachers in new educational environment.

This chapter presents some important aspects of modern approaches to engineering education. The Section 2 describes the model of the network educational system, based on the Internet technologies, and learning process maintenance system with its support by automated subsystems. The Sections 3.1 and 3.2 describe issues of management of students' learning-cognitive activity by means of introduction of self-directed learning (SDL), specify the cognition process as an iterative process of obtaining new knowledge and introduce dynamic training elements (DTE) designed on the principle of the cybernetic model of cognitive process. The Sections 3.3 and 3.4 demonstrate the usage of remote access laboratories and analyze issues of pedagogic value and pedagogical usefulness of electronic educational environment. The Section 3.5 discusses issues of information interaction between students and teachers in new educational environment. The section 4 suggests the new method of quality evaluation of distance learning process. The section 5 contains conclusions and discussions. In the Appendix the best practice of applications of modern approaches to engineering education is described.
