Present Trends and Possibilities of International Integration of Engineering Education at Technical Universities in Slovak Republic

Traditional engineering education at technical universities can be recently considered as a highly integrated study penetrating into many scientific disciplines. The integration trends of technical education are manifested mainly in the area of introducing innovative study programme having an interdisciplinary character. When creating such study programmes and the study structure, the emphasis is increasingly laid on a maximal flexibility of the education, providing students with the possibility of their own selfprofilation according to requirements or demands of industry. That is why individual mobilities of students allowing them to work on cooperative projects between universities and the industry are strongly supported. The cooperation is oriented toward a common utilization of research laboratories for solving tasks of applied research and fundamental or theoretical research. Moreover, the international character of the integrating effort of particular technical universities plays an important role in drafting educational programmes on various levels of the engineering study. In the contribution, a present situation in the engineering university education at selected technical universities in the Slovak Republic is described. Simultaneously, possibilities of developing programmes of engineering education are indicated from the viewpoint of participating the universities in the international exchange of informationa at all levels of academic and scientific-research activities. Also, a model of distant education operating at the Technical University in Kosice, in which accessible and progressive methods of lecturing are used, is introduced. This contribution also hints at the possibilities of the international support of the education through various foundations as well as at concrete aspects of international cooperation in the area of academic exchange of students and teachers, especially in the framework of DAAD. A part of the contribution represent some results of analyses concerned with the creation of internationally cooperating educational institutions, namely academic institutes, departments, integrated teams, etc. Using a practical example, a possibility of establishing joined European department for mining and mineral engineering is presented, that could substitute for many of present mine academies and universities in the area of central Europe. It is based on the tradition of the mining engineering education at the BERG Faculty of Technical University in Kosice, as well as of other, historically well known mining academies or universities located in the region. The main idea of such conception is the need for a permanent transformation of study of the university mining engineering to the interdisciplinary study with a marked international character. An indivisible part of such engineering education should be aesthetization, humanization and ecologization of the curricula contents and structure of the study directed to geoaesthetics.