Virtual Educational Environment as One of the Perspective Technologies of e-Learning in Foreign Language Teaching

Currently, training of professional engineers able to be competitive with foreign counterparts in the international labor market is one of the most important problems of Russian technical universities. To achieve this goal, graduates of engineering universities are required to speak a foreign language at the appropriate level to follow the latest advances in science and technology and become professional and competent experts in their field. Teaching a foreign language in the current context is an important task in the complex of humanitarian training in a technical university, as future specialists, speaking a foreign language, keep themselves open to their professional activities. UNESCO experts and governments of different countries come to the conclusion that good results can be achieved if universities use e-learning foreign language management systems. It is a brand-new technology of education for life in the information society, orienting a student to a new work style, developing skills and abilities for continuing education. The e-learning(EL) technology completely changes a person’s attitude to education, provides an opportunity to learn anywhere, anytime, and throughout life, even without leaving home and not crossing borders. In recent decades the problem of building successful EL-strategies for learning a foreign language has become extremely relevant and widely discussed throughout the world. Innovative foreign language courses are being developed and implemented using EL technologies in many technical universities. Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University (the RF) is not an exception. E-learning has long been actively implemented in the educational process of the university. On the basis of the Moodle virtual educational environment, an educational portal was created. The portal contains a catalog of courses on the main subjects taught in the university. The goal of this article is to consider the implementation of e-learning technologies in the following fields: Foreign Language, Foreign Language in Professional Activities, Business Foreign Language, Professionally-Oriented Translation, the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools for optimal organization of educational activities.