With the rapid development of digital technology, IT students must be competitive in the internal and external labor markets. This requires the possession of a variety of professional skills, especially competencies in the development of mobile applications.

In the Innovation University of Eurasia (Pavlodar), in order to expand the competence of students, IT-areas began training on the course “Programming Android Applications” of the Siberian State University of Telecommunications and Informatics (Novosibirsk). Training within the framework of academic mobility became possible thanks to the project “Paving the way to interregional mobility and ensuring relevance, quality and equity of access” of the Erasmus + program (//ineu.edu.kz/ru/nashi-partnery/mezhdunarodnoe-sotrudnichestvo/erasmus-plus/key-action-2-menu/programma-erasmus-pawer).
The training course is aimed at obtaining practical skills in developing commercial applications for mobile devices (for example, “Automated recording of warehouse operations using a mobile phone”, “Monitoring using a mobile phone premises, vehicles” and many others) that may be of interest to specific consumers. The complexity of the discipline is 4 credits ECTS or 144 hours.
The course is organized in such a way that students can, without leaving the country, begin learning and “dive” into the subject matter. The remote period lasts about 3 months. To do this, students are given access to a training course hosted in an electronic information and educational environment, with a schedule of work, video lectures, practical exercises and test tasks. As part of this stage, students independently study the educational material, issue teacher assignments to students and check them in the Moodle system, and conduct teacher classes for students in a virtual classroom (based on the Mirapolis platform). It is also planned to develop the project under the guidance and in consultation of the course teacher in the Moodle.
 
After successful completion of tasks and projects in the distance learning system, a short mobile full-time stage is organized for 7 days. This stage is necessary so that the teacher can personally meet with the students and hold additional consultations. Here, within the walls of the teaching university of SibSUTI, students are protected by the final project. Students who have successfully mastered this course receive documents on the course of training in the form of a certificate and an electronic portfolio, which will certainly be useful to graduates in the modern labor market.
Training began on April 15, 2019. What difficulties have we encountered? First of all, this is low motivation, or rather its steady decline from each week of the course. And this is not connected with the content or the teacher: the course materials are presented at a qualitative level, the content is logically aligned, the teacher was constantly on the "connection". The main problem was that the students were not ready for distance learning. Distance learning implies a high motivation of students to learn. In the beginning, they had a motivation, because they enrolled in a course, however, the course is designed for a rather long period, and the absence of a physically nearby teacher who controls the learning process contributed to the students postponing the distance course assignments every day.
We saw ways to solve this problem in increasing the motivation for distance learning of students. To this end, curator hours and individual consultations with students were held on the importance of expanding professional competencies in addition to the competencies that they receive at the university. We discussed the models of HardSkills - SoftSkills, time management technology and the possibility of self-realization at the university. A good example for them was also participation in the HR-forum, which was held at the university on May 30, 2019, at which successful leaders of large and medium-sized companies shared their experiences in organizing their activities.
 
In order to carry out additional psychological and pedagogical support for students in the learning process, teachers from the supervising department “Information technologies” of InEU also signed up for a distance course.
The mobile training phase of the course took place from July 8 to July 12, 2019. According to the results of the remote stage, the best projects were selected, and their authors were invited to the final stage in Novosibirsk - to defend a course project. 
 
Thanks to the project “Paving the way to interregional mobility and ensuring relevance, quality and equity of access” of the Erasmus + program, we have the opportunity to implement academic mobility in a high-ranking university in Russia. The developed mechanisms for transferring units, which are obtained as a methodological result of the project, allowed the base university (InEU) to add the discipline “Programming Android Applications” to the student transcript as successfully mastered.

In addition to the obvious advantages for students who are given by the experience of organizing training in the course, we also gained experience using innovative educational technologies at SibSUTI, which will certainly find application in our university.

Head of the Department "Information Technology" 
Asainova A.Zh.
Head of Information Technology and Academic Affairs 
Abykenova D.B.