DISTANCE LEARNING AND E-LEARNING IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC

. IV.year 2005 –2006: Realisation of the 1st year DL bachelor course. Top management decided that DL will be hold in not overlapping time blocks, e.g. the time period for every course is set at the beginning of the academic year, so students do not have to amuse their energy and attention into different subjects at the same time. V.year 2006 – 2007: Getting the students’ feedback an improvement of study materials and courses, whole organisation of the bachelor study and Preparation of study materials for 2nd and 3rd year of study. During project planning were determined expected outcomes like:  complete change of the external system of study at the FE by introduction of blended study mode,  complete distance education bachelor study system and its implementation. The project still continues – today is in V. phase, but the phases II-V will be repeated until faculty will provide mentioned course. In the following table is presented the prosperousness in subjects of the students who started with the course in 2005 Number of students/ Percentage At the start 32 100% At the end of the 1st year 17 53% Subjects Mathematics I 16 50% Mathematics II 13 41% Informatics I 25 78% Informatics II 13 41% Microeconomics 26 81% Macroeconomics 13 41% Management 13 41% Human Resource Management 27 84% Business Law 27 84% Table 1 Percentage of successfulness of students Students have access to all features of the LMS Moodle like study materials: electronic text books, animations, videos, specialised links, presentations, etc. and communication tools like e-mail, messages, chat rooms, forums, etc. (Fig.2), during their study. All mentioned features have big success among students and they are frequently used to active learning.

CONCLUSIONS Students at the Technical University of Košice are intensively interesting in new technologies and possibilities of study by distance learning. This model of education wil be spread at another faculties of the University. Based on the numbers obtained during last year we should say that our project of DL is reached success. Of course the real success or failure we can present only after graduating first course students in the next year 2008. OECD Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (OBHE) 2004 analysed results of the survey of e-learning in 19 tertiary education institutions in 13 countries. The main finding was in fact that “[5] the types of e-learning offered by universities range right across the e-learning spectrum, but in most campus-based institutions the growth of e-learning has not altered the fact that face-to-face classroom teaching remains central”. Only 5% of students in analysed countries were studying fully online courses. The mostly appeared teaching methods combined online elements with typically classroom based teaching. Despite this fact the European educational institutions clearly want offering e-learning and distance learning and improve their e-learning strategies. The vision of virtual classes that replace typically classrooms isn’t the target of the e-learning development. E-learning provides first of all possibility for universities to enlarge their capacity and enable the access to education for more students. REFERENCES

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