scientific journal of the modern education & research institute • The Kingdom of Belgium
and students work together, thereby providing the quality of teaching and accompanying the educational process an independent, useful, effective and motivating to the development approach [5, p. 14]. During the study period (2014 – 2018) about 600 post graduate students of non-linguistic specialties of SibFU participated in blended learning course «English for PhD students». Blended learning enables to use many different forms and methods in foreign language teaching. This course uses practical tasks to develop the language and communication skills of students who need to use English in a scientific research and professional environment. Course instructions were designed to help post-graduate students navigate in the interface of the system and use all its capabilities to improve their overall performance in the learning environment. They include learning objectives, suggestions for e-learning on the LMS platform, detailed planning for an academic year, deadlines when material needs to be learned by, assessment criteria. Postgraduates studying by correspondence receive support and carry out assignments online. This course is divided into eight theme modules: The scientific community; Writing up research; Writing a scientific research article; Preparing reports and presentations; Attending the conference; International cooperation and research visits; Translating scientific papers. Each module contains various activities for communication, assessment, self-study and administration (Table 1). Table 1. The Blended Learning Course «English for post graduate students»
During the classroom face-to-face sessions post-graduate students show their progress, have an opportunity to communicate with a teacher, to work in a team, etc. Supplementary materials, tests, interactive lectures, video, hyperlinks are given on the on-line platform. The blended learning and synchronous online learning, which combines computer-mediated activities with traditional face-to-face classroom methods, gave us a great opportunity to use the best of current assessment tools. Testing provides an array of benefits for both the learner and the teacher and can be used in traditional, blended and online learning contexts. We designed varying types of tests, such as multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blanks, true or false, or essay questions. Testing can be made unique by randomizing question and answer order. This is especially useful when a learner has to re-do a test when he previously had poor performance on. Catering to the needs of different learning styles gives us a chance to engage everyone in an online class (Table 2 and Table 3). Through a reporting system a teacher can overview of test scores, has the ability to analyze which students scored highest/ lowest, and which questions were hardest/ easiest for the majority of students. Re58