Leveraging Crowd-Based Technologies For Education In It-Students Professional Training

The development of the academic discipline virtual environment enabled by the digital technologies, adoption of the teacher's innovative approach have evolved due to the need of the national higher education transformation in its effort to meet the modern labour market towards the level of prospective specialists' professional training. The article characterises the key features of virtual learning environment of the academic discipline that should be based on the principles of the modern didactics of higher education and correlate with network decentralized learning models; crowdsourcing was singled out as an innovation in teaching and learning. The authors give the grounded definition of "crowdsourcing for education" and "educational crowd-based technologies" and clarify the impact they have on those involved in teaching and learning. To meet the objectives of the research a conceptual model of the educational crowd-based technologies for teaching and learning a foreign language for specific purposes particularly ESP to the IT-students has been developed. It presents the variability of educational crowd-based technologies: crowd-teaching, crowd-learning, crowd-assessing, through collective, group, individual, distant forms of organization of educational process and electronic educational resources - crowdsourcing platforms, online-services, mobile applications and the Internet as a source of educational material.During the experiment the effectiveness of this model was tested against two criteria: a motivational-cognitive one and the criterion of students involvement in educational and cognitive activities. Each of them is characterized by indicators that enabled to diagnose the positive dynamics of the level of students' knowledge of a foreign language for specific purposes with the emphasis on communication approach. The statistical processing of the data collected by applying the median has proved the effectiveness of the model.