The paper gives the understanding of the general concept and first results of implementation of the joint project by the National Training Foundation and Institute for the Information Society "Development of the system of in-service professional training for the faculty of Russian universities focusing on the development of the distance learning courses and the Internet-based teaching". The project is built under the Distance Education Concept worked out by the Laboratory of Distance Education at Russian Academy of Education.
The objective of the project is to develop a system of the Internet-based courses for faculty as an alternative version to the remnants of the post-soviet system of faculty training state institutes. The system includes the information and educational environment built on the Internet with the help of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), DL platform, recently developed by the World Bank Institute and distributed on a freeware basis among universities in Russia and other NIS countries.
Several web-based courses were developed to satisfy the high priority needs and interests of the faculty in Distance Learning, i.e. pilot (one semester) courses in "The basics of development and support of DL courses" and "Teaching on the Internet". These courses will be followed by subject oriented courses in the field of Humanities (Sociology, Politology, Economy). Those faculty who are the students of the first two courses in DL courses development and methods of the Internet-based teaching will become the developers and on-line teachers for the specialized courses. The authors of the course expect the exponential growth of the number of faculty trained at these web-courses next year.
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