Students' Motivation for Lifelong Learning: Challenges in Engineering Education

The development of competencies in lifelong learning is one of the most changing questions in higher education since the concept of lifelong learning emerged. A variety of methods and tools has been adopted for lifelong education but the question of their efficiency is still open. This article aims to offer a set of most motivating tools for lifelong learning in engineering education. The authors argue that competencies in lifelong learning for engineers should be developed differently from the ones for students from social sciences, as students must learn to resolve complex technical problems that do not necessarily comply with the subject-by-subject classification. After defining the challenges of motivation in the engineering education, the study of motivational problems for lifelong learning continues with an analysis of active learning methods and their application in engineering education. The perception of lifelong learning and engineering students' attitudes to active learning methods are underlined in the empirical part of the article.