IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF DISTANCE LEARNING COURSES IN LATVIA

The scientific interest in distance learning has been formed long time ago. The form of part-time education was in demand also in previous years, and now, in the era of rapid development of telecommunication technologies, special attention is paid to distance learning as a form of part-time education. The academic staffs enhance big expectations on the telecommunications and the Internet resources. The main research question of this paper is: the general development trends of the main drivers for attracting more students into - quality distance learning in Latvia. One of the research tasks is to analyze and develop a new scheme that shows the current situation and the future development trends in the distance learning of the higher education. The relevance of the research: the authors review the intersections of the distance learning and it quality as the optimal solutions for the critical situation in the Latvian higher education sector with low of students. Distance learning as one of the new and perspective forms of completing higher education increases in popularity around the world. The two main factors have led to an explosion of interest in distance learning: the growing need for continual skills upgrading and retraining; and the technological advances that have made it possible to teach more and more subjects at a distance (UNESCO, 2002). In 2013 the European Commission launched an initiative "to set out a framework for enhancing learning and teaching through new technologies and open digital content at all levels of education." The changing learning and teaching environment encourages higher education institutions to use distance learning tools more intensively (Bierne, Titko, 2016). One of the essential education system objectives in modern society is to ensure that everyone has free and public access to education lifelong, taking into account his interests, abilities and needs. This objective was handled by the European, Asian and American countries in terms of higher education, the advanced training, including both full-time and part-time forms of education. Distance learning has rich traditions and successes. Tens of thousands of people around the world received higher or second higher education passing through the system of part-time education. The distance learning in Latvia appeared more than 12 years ago and successfully existed on experimental basis for improving the pedagogical skills of the Latvian lecturers and preparing reports for international scientific conferences. Over the past three to five years, the situation has changed significantly. Almost all Latvian universities started using teleconferences for communication between their branches located in different regions of Latvia.