On November 15th 2011 one more joint educational project named Intellectual Transport systems (ITS) with MSTU as a participant has begun. The most of EU Tempus – financed projects are known to have a rather high amount of partners. So, ITS is not an exception and represents a consortium of 12 universities from Russia, Ukraine and EU which are to collaboratively develop and bring into educational process Master’s and Doctor’s programmes in the field of transport flows optimization by using integrated high-tech telecommunications and information systems.
Why is there a necessity of having plenty of participants in the project? The idea is that representing various transport modes – rail, aviation, road and maritime – the project consortium members will firstly work over key syllabus components within the ITS Master and Doctor programmes that are common for all universities and then they will divide into several working groups and develop specialized syllabus modules focused upon preparing specialists for particular transport spheres.
MSTU is planning to actively cooperate with Transport and Telecommunication Institute, Latvia, and Odessa National Maritime University, Ukraine. In other words MSTU is supposed to learn and adopt the experience of European partners while showing its own practices in training of specialists in the field of marine transport control and management.
And how can we see the key issue regarding the final output of the project, particularly for MSTU? The University is expected to implement extremely up-to-date Master programme "Intellectual Transport Systems" to train engineers in the maritime transport field with a deep knowledge of advanced information and telecommunications technologies for vehicles and transport flows control and optimization. What is important, Master students within the ITS course can have the option of off- and on-site learning in one of EU universities and obtaining EU diploma. And the first ITS masters are expected to finish the course in 2015.
