Students of Belarusian universities were told how and how often changes are made to the curricula of the country's institutes and universities.
In order to understand the entire process of change, the rector of the Brest State Technical University, Sergei Kasperovich, recommended paying attention to the hierarchy of parts of the educational programs.
According to him, “there is a specialty and an educational standard that contains some of the disciplines of the state component.”
Fundamental and practical orientation
These disciplines are presented in all universities of the republic where this specialty is available.
This is such a fundamental basis, because in higher education one very complex problem is being solved - the intersection of practice-orientedness and fundamentality, - the Belta agency quotes the rector.
He notes that since the number of hours is always limited, a “reasonable balance” must be found.
If fundamentality provides a specialist with the opportunity to learn and teach others throughout his life, then practical orientation allows him to immediately and effectively solve production problems.
And the state component is about both fundamentality and individual applied issues that are being unified, Kasperovich emphasized.
According to his data, about 50% of the curriculum content is not regulated by the standard.
Therefore, each university has the opportunity to include its own disciplines in the curriculum, providing training taking into account the specifics of the region’s enterprises.
Contacts with enterprises
The peculiarity here is that universities must be in constant contact with enterprises on the issue of improving the program.
This means that university representatives must study the issue directly at enterprises based on opinions regarding the topics and sections of their curricula.
There, in factories and plants, universities must determine, according to their programs, what is no longer relevant and what will become relevant in the near future.
Using the example of Brest State Technical University, I can say that we regularly hold board meetings of directors of enterprises, twice a year, the rector noted.
He added: university teachers go to enterprises (on an internship basis), where they “specifically work on certain issues.”
After all this work has been done, changes are made to the university curricula. And every year.
The educational and methodological complexes that reflect the content of a specific discipline are also updated every year. The internship programs are also adjusted, Kasperovich concluded.
