Flexible engineering educational concept: Insight into students’ competences growth in creativity, activity, cooperation

The recent studies on employee’s flexibility are showing that the amount of career-ready employees with the required competences, who are also motivated, is rising. In many operational work positions in modern manufacturing companies, employees must manage a wider range of issues and responsibilities than before. Engineering education has been and will continue to be vital in everyday life of people around the real world, but students must have competences in development of creativity, activity, and cooperation to keep up with the speed of innovations. The article responds to the outputs of the National Project "Key Competences Formation and Effective Support of Students Mobility at Technology Faculties" in the context of the work and use of technology knowledge and didactics. It is also in the intention of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Zilina, Slovakia, through the knowledge obtained from the project research to offer each interested educational institutions an opportunity to adopt flexible education environment concept to support students’ creativity, activity, cooperation concept (CAC) in order to focus better on improving student´s learning procedure and increasing the quality of instruction procedure. The paper brings the results of the current national educational agency research project focused on effectiveness of flexible didactics with new virtual technologies, organization forms and methods in student-focused concept through the processing of experimental data of the electronics study program in the period of 2017- 2019. The implementation of a new CAC has proven an effective flexible learning environment to work well as a method for elevating key career-ready competences. The main benefit of the study is the new insight into students´ competences growth on the engineering career-ready knowledge scaffold with significant findings and recommendations. The innovative concept is based on standardized automated hardware, virtual instrumentation software and simulation-driven support with a new assessment to identify and reflect on the students´ competences learning experiences outcomes during didactic cycle to examine the flexible environment helpfulness of virtual tools and simulation driven learning and to explore how the concept enhances graduates career-ready creativity, activity, cooperation competences growth piloted with a multinational company that is a producer of automated equipment and virtual instrumentation software.