The Humanitarian Component in Modernizing the Engineering Education under the Conditions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Abstract

The new avenues in the innovative development of the education system are determined by the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution. A strategy aimed at transforming the National Research University Moscow Power Engineering Institute (NRU MPEI) into a higher school corresponding to the University 3.0 concept, is being consistently implemented at the NRU MPEI, which combines scientific, educational, and technological innovations in its activities. The importance of the problem is reflected in the decisions of the Academic Council meeting held on February 15, 2019 and in the report presented by the NRU MPEI rector N.D. Rogalev.

The key figure in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also termed as Industry 4.0, an organizational and technical system intended for achieving technological breakthroughs, is an engineer. The training of engineers is a strategic objective of utmost importance; its successful solution is a necessary condition for making the state competitive and able to ensure national security. A graduate from an engineering and technical higher school who will be in demand at a neoindustrial production facility must have universal competences of both professional and general cultural content. In this regard, the role of the humanitarian component in the engineering training of students is invariably increasing, because it is only humanities that form a new thinking pattern in a specialist who strives for constant self-improvement and self-education.

The purpose of the article is to study the leading theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of modern approaches to humanitarian training of engineers under the conditions of shaping the Industry 4.0 system.

Engineering activities in the post-industrial world are becoming increasingly integrated, comprehensive, and innovative in nature. It is exactly through the system of engineering education that highly qualified personnel are trained for the Industry 4.0 system, which determines the growth of its importance. Professional competences are of top priority for the future specialist, but the dynamics of their obsolescence is very high. In the modern realities of neoindustrialism, the creative and projective abilities of students, which are least prone to devaluation, are of utmost importance.

The article presents a comparative analysis of foreign and domestic experience and discusses ways avenues of imparting more humane and humanitarian features to engineering education under the conditions of forming the University 3.0 model and on the basis of implementing universal competences according to the Federal State Educational Standard of Higher Education 3++.