Role of MOOCs in teaching Mathematics to students majoring in Engineering

Abstract

The research is dedicated to the features of providing mathematical training to would-be engineers through using the potential of mass open online courses. The article reveals the importance of mathematical training as the basis for forming the professional competence of engineers. A sociological poll among the participants of the educational process at Russian technical universities revealed high awareness of the professors about MOOCs (93.3%), while only 45.4% of students knew about such platforms. The undisputed leader by popularity among both professors (53.3%) and students (34.5%) is the project “National platform of open education”. The reasons impeding the use of mass open online courses are: the lack of spare time, the lack of skills of working in such format, and the lack of regulation for introducing the results of studying at MOOC into the formal educational process. At the same time, analysis of Coursera, EdX, Open Education, Intuit, Lektorium and Stepik platforms showed that, as of January 2021, 150 courses were available in the broad and specific mathematical domains. Intensification of using MOOCs in preparing for academic sessions may increase the efficiency of mastering knowledge and skills in solving practical mathematical tasks, which would improve training of the would-be engineers.