New Media in Formal and Non-formal Higher Education in Social Sciences

Abstract

IT-era has changed not only the notion of intercultural communication worldwide, but also every aspect of human reality. In this paper, the authors present the application of electronic media in formal and non-formal education in Croatian higher education institutions on the example of the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. Special attention is paid to specific computer programmes, language databases and tools for machine translation and machine-assisted translation used in the teaching process within the Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer-Linguists as a new type of non-formal interdisciplinary education delivered at that faculty. In the introductory part, the authors discuss the role of new media in formal higher education and present results of a questionnaire conducted among teaching staff of the Faculty of Law Osijek related to application of the Internet and other new IT-media in specific courses. The main part of the paper is focused on the analysis of the course Online Translation Tools and EU Vocabulary, carried out within the Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer-Linguists. Teaching contents of that course are delivered by using computer technology (translation tools and databases accessible online), which serves as a medium for teaching translation. Simultaneously, instructing students in proper and skilful usage of those media represents the principal goal of that course.  In the concluding part, the authors try to determine the role of new media and IT in formal and non-formal types of tertiary education in the future.