The Modernisation of Historical Education in a Higher Engineering School (The Case of Tomsk Polytechnic University)

The research summarises the experience of humanitarian education modernisation, which took place in Tomsk Polytechnic University within the past 3 years. The "reform" was launched to enhance the implementation of social and humanitarian skills required in engineering. One of the modernised courses was the course of Russian history. History as an academic discipline has a key value due to its association with cognitive factors in the educational process and its position in the curriculum of academic disciplines in Russian universities: it is usually one of the first social and humanitarian sciences that introduce future engineers to the human activity (important both for their personal and professional development). The structure of the modernised course combines classroom teaching with e-learning based on the Moodle platform. The virtual environment includes principal textual and video content, as well as tasks for independent creative work, including group-project activities. The task of modernisation sets new challenges. One of them is a shift in the teaching of history, practiced for many previous years, which requires changes both in the content and in the methods of instruction. The modernised course is built around a social and cultural context. This choice, among other advantages, concentrates on social processes, and thus it helps to show the connection of science, technology and social life. Professors systematically use active teaching methods. Students read texts of lectures independently in the electronic environment. Lecture materials are referred to in the tasks of the Moodle course and during the professor-led module. The system-forming element of the new course is a group project that allows students to develop cognitive, communicative, and organisational skills. Project activities, in addition, provide first-year students' better adaptability to the higher engineering education. Narrowly specialised disciplines in the engineering education curriculum come in the second or third year. Thus, freshmen have no way to apply their professional interests, which is the basis for their professional choice; this negatively affects the intrinsic motivation for studying and problematises the relevance of all disciplines in the curriculum (especially the humanities). In this regard, the possibility to work on a project leads to professional self-realisation; the results of a survey indicate a generally positive students' attitude to this activity. Representatives of relevant technical areas of training within Tomsk Polytechnic University also participate in the discussion of the educational programme for the humanitarian disciplines, of the themes of projects in particular. Thus, the modernisation of humanitarian education promotes interaction between various actors in the educational process: professors and students of the humanities and engineering. The authors believe that, after the modernisation, the work in the history course is of an educational nature, and it aims to develop social competences and adapt engineering students to their self-independent, creative cognitive activity.

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