BILATERAL COLLABORATION FOR ICT SUPPORT IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

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In the framework of R&D programmes a bilateral collaboration between the University of Zagreb – Faculty of Organization and Informatics, Varaždin (FOI) and the Slovak University of Technology – Faculty of Materials Science and Technology (FMST) was started, this was based on ICT support in engineering education. Target activities were focused on FP7 Partner search and information exchange, mainly in the field of e-learning, technology enhanced learning (TEL) and blended learning. The possibility of language support via technology was also investigated. As a separate part of the information exchange an active contribution of the FMST at the Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems (Varaždin) can also be mentioned. It should be underlined that today’s teachers must perform the three basic activities of – teaching, publishing and participating in research projects. In addition, they must perform daily administrative and organisational activities related to teaching and learning, for instance, those interlinked with academic information systems inter alia. This means that engineering education is not only “teaching” as it is usually understood between common teachers. Someone has to be there to take care of these other activities. In general, from the ICT point of view, the support for all types of educational activities that are to be solved. One of the experiences from the FOI – FMST collaboration shows that to prepare the university subjects for any cooperation within the European Research Area (ERA) is relatively complicated and time consuming, e.g. it requires more time to create an engineering course of study. Beside a need of finding shared expertise, there are always difficulties with language barriers, because English is not a native language of the partners. On the other hand, within the performance of the FP7 Partner Search, all international partners wanted to discuss a complete project idea and were mostly looking for a project leader as well. Therefore, within the collaboration a specific project structure for the ICT support was designed, which comprises of autonomous blocks on the issues of engineering content, informatics tools, TEL outputs and a “Network of Networks”. For the purpose of Partner Search, many informatics, pedagogical, combined and navigation templates had to be