Universal IT Support Design for Engineering Education

From the point of view of integrating IT into teaching, current technologies do not provide a universal solution for teachers’ personal support and have a shorter lifespan than required by teachers and educational processes. As a result, technology cannot be adapted to a wide range of teaching activities, and instead, teachers have to adapt to the technology. This paper presents a universal solution for support based on an interdisciplinary approach to the integration of IT into university teaching and learning, self-study, publishing, research, and other personal activities performed by a teacher, including certain activities of students. It is based on the development of our own in-house universal IT system (educational software, communication channels and combined offline/online infrastructure), which can be used for any form of engineering or STEM teaching. The uniqueness of our solution is based on the design of so-called virtual knowledge, which makes it possible to insert concentrated educational content in the form of text, images, audio and other computer files, in a suitable way. From this virtual knowledge, educational knowledge tables are created using WPad educational software. This allows for simultaneous conversion of the tables into HTML format and their placement on the faculty’s virtual learning space or the web. In this paper, we describe the use of this system and how it works on an infrastructure developed for the integration of IT into teaching. The automation of the teacher’s work (including applications for visually impaired people) through the creation of educational packages is described, and this will also form the subject of further research.