Continuing education program: development and implementation at the University cluster

Abstract

The increasing demand for secondary vocational education programs has drawn even more attention to the didactic support of the continuing education programs implemented in the college-to-university transition system. Their obvious benefit is the shortened period of professional training of specialists while maintaining the highest possible quality of the University cluster, where a vocational college is the primary level of the university training. The experience of implementing secondary vocational education programs in Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy taking into account the specifics of the technical training and vocational teacher training necessitated the appropriate infrastructural modification: the establishing of the College of Technology and the Center for Technological Support of Education. The results of the questionnaire survey of students of the College of Technology confirmed the need and relevance of the development of continuing educational programs with a shortened period of study. The methodology of designing continuing educational programs consists of successive logically interrelated stages: analytical designing, verification and implementation, correction and optimization. The first stage is the most challenging and time-consuming for the program developers: it is necessary to determine the invariant component of secondary vocational and higher education, which should be taken into account to develop a continuous Bachelor program that would provide short -time training. In the subsequent stages, this program is to be implemented, evaluated and adjusted. Using this methodology, the author attempted to develop a continuous educational program for the training area 44.03.04 ‘Vocational Education and Training (Sector-Specific)’ based on the vocational college program 44.02.03 ‘Pedagogy of Additional Training (Technical Creativity Area)’. The program is intended for training vocational teachers in accordance with the requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard in a shortened time.