Educational Trajectories Modeling for Practice-Oriented Higher Education

Abstract

This article is devoted to modeling and managing educational trajectories for competitive graduates learning in knowledge-intensive professional areas of practice-oriented higher education. The authors propose the educational space and educational trajectories models of the practical-oriented programs of study (PoS). These models consider numerous factors of influence—changes in the regulatory framework of profiles and trends in the professional field, planned and achieved student learning outcomes. The educational space's main feature is its redundancy—it contains the maximum possible number of planned learning outcomes. The model involves detailing elementary ones’ primary competence and then comparing them with the educational space Q’s expected learning outcomes. The model in the form of a hyper-graph (plan-graph) establishes causal relationships between learning outcomes, including planned ones. The authors propose a method of managing educational trajectories based on a multi-layer plan-graph of the workshop. This research result is the educational space and the plan-graph of PoS “Computer Systems and Technologies” of ITMO University. With these models’ help, two versions of the “Network Protocols” course workshop were developed and implemented in the educational process (in 2019 and 2020 years). The workshop was tested by students of the 3rd semester of the master's program. The expert community in network technologies evaluated the achieved results of training in this discipline in the form of a course project. To assess the effectiveness of the workshops’ updated versions, the authors used the degree of closeness of students’ tasks in the course project to real professional tasks. For the last academic year, it was 73%, and after the implementation of the modified version of the workshop in the current academic year—90%.