HUMANITIES IN ENGINEERING MASTER’S DEGREE PROGRAMS: PROJECT-BASED EDUCATION AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Engineering Master’s programs attract both recent Bachelor’s degree graduates and professionals who have long worked in industry and are interested in hard rather than soft skills. The role of soft skills, however, is significant, they contribute to students’ self-development, determine their individual tracks of self-education, develop systemic, critical, project and strategic thinking for teamwork, and skills for academic and professional communication in different languages and cultures. One possible solution to this problem is to raise the status of these disciplines, giving them a professional orientation. The article describes project-based methods and digital technologies to enhance the humanities in engineering graduate programs. Project-based methods are characterized in terms of students’ obtaining micro-credentials in each of the classes, solving specific problems from real life. The project format is modified through the use of digital interactive tools, making them allies for professors rather than competitors. In the experience of Kazan National Research Technological University in teaching such disciplines as “Project Management”, “Social and Psychological Basis of Teamwork and Self-Development” and “Professionally Oriented Foreign Language”, online tools are used for collaborative project work, including various online boards, for assessment of students’ achievements, including questionnaires and quizzes, as well as for independent extracurricular work, including online constructors of training simulators. The results of the study show that project-based methods, supported by digital interactive tools, significantly increase the engineering master students` motivation to study humanities, which initially seem unnecessary for their professional activities. In addition, interdisciplinary links allow developing different universal competences within one project.

Engineering Master’s program, humanities, soft skills, project-based methods, digital technologies, interdisciplinary links, student motivation, self-development, humanization of education, micro-credentials

Ziyatdinova J. N. Humanities in engineering master’s degree programs: project-based education and digital technologies. Biznes. Obrazovanie. Pravo = Business. Education. Law. 2023;3(64):404—407. DOI: 10.25683/VOLBI.2023.64.710.