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DEVELOPING COMMUNICATION COMPETENCIES OF UNIVERSITY
STUDENTS IN THE CREDIT-MODULE SYSTEM
Sh.K. Abdurasulova
Guliston State University, Faculty of Psychology and Social Sciences,
"Methods of Primary Education" Department, Lecturer
Annotation:
This article explores the pedagogical possibilities of developing communication
competencies of future teachers in the context of the credit-module system. It provides an in-
depth explanation of the credit-module system, its potential, and its importance in developing
students' communication competence. Definitions of the content of communication
competence are also provided.
Keywords:
credit, module, system, process, education, competence, communicative, method,
interactive, independent, system, reform, opportunity, quality of education, independent
education, creative, innovative, technology.
On October 8, 2019, the President of our country signed the Decree "On Approving the
Concept of Development of Higher Education in the Republic of Uzbekistan until 2030."
This important political document outlines the inclusion of at least 10 higher education
institutions in the country in the ranking of the first 1000 universities globally and the gradual
transition to the credit-module system in higher education institutions.
The concept of academic credits was first introduced in American universities in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries. The establishment of education content and programs in credits
allowed for significant changes in the organization of the educational process, including
independent planning, monitoring, and evaluation systems, creating ample opportunities for
improving educational technologies.
In 1869, Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University and a prominent figure in
American education, introduced the concept of "credit hours." By 1870-1880, the system
based on credit hours was implemented. The credit system provided students the opportunity
to independently plan their educational process, control its quality, and improve educational
technologies.
Today, the introduction of the credit collection scale not only grants students more freedom
but also provides them with the ability to independently plan their educational process,
helping them become competitive specialists in their chosen fields. This system has also led
to improvements in evaluation methods and educational technologies.
Starting from the 1970s, European universities began efforts to address several issues related
to the integration of higher education institutions, creating a unified standard, establishing
mobility for students and teachers, recognizing diplomas, and assessing students'
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page 813
qualifications and skills. As a result of these efforts, the Bologna Declaration was signed in
Bologna, Italy, in 1999 by representatives from 29 countries.
Today, over 50 countries participate in the Bologna Process. Among the CIS countries are
Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.
According to the Bologna system, highly qualified personnel are trained in two stages:
typically, a bachelor’s program takes at least three years, and a master’s program lasts 1-2
years.
As specified in the Bologna Declaration, the credit-module system primarily serves two
functions with a focus on independent learning: first, ensuring the mobility of students and
teachers, allowing for seamless transition from one institution to another (whether for study
or work); second, ensuring that students' academic workload is clearly defined in terms of
credits, reflecting how much they have mastered in their chosen program.
The credit-module system is a combination of modular teaching technologies and an
evaluation model based on credit measurement. Implementing this system is a multifaceted
and complex process. The credit-module principle emphasizes two key aspects: ensuring
independent student work and evaluating students' knowledge through a ranking system.
Analyzing the experiences of foreign universities in implementing credit-module teaching
technologies shows that the primary focus is on improving the quality of professional training,
maximizing the individualization of the educational process, creating a conducive
environment, developing personalized educational trajectories for each student, and
continuously diagnosing and monitoring students' academic achievements to identify
developmental milestones.
Today, the issues, challenges, recommendations, and proposals related to the organization of
the educational process in the credit-module system have been analyzed and discussed in the
works of V. Orinov, B. Usmonov, R. Khabibullaev, and Sh. Mustafaqulov.
The credit-module system is an educational process organization model based on the
combination of modular teaching technologies and the ECTS credit unit as measurement
units for the academic workload required to master substantive modules.
ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) was introduced in 1989 as part of the Erasmus
program. After successful trials, the system has been adopted by higher education institutions
across Europe. Initially, ECTS was used to calculate and transfer credits when students
moved from one university to another. This system helped in the recognition of foreign
higher education institutions, leading to an increase in educational quality and student
mobility across European universities.
The introduction of the credit-module system has allowed higher education institutions to use
credits as the unit of measure for students' academic workload. The system’s increasing
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ISSN: 2692-5206, Impact Factor: 12,23
American Academic publishers, volume 05, issue 05,2025
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importance led to its integration into the Bologna Declaration in 1999, which made it a
regional, national, and European-wide system.
The credit-modular system is a model of organizing the educational process based on
modular teaching technologies and credits as units of measurement of the student's
educational workload. The credit-modular system of organizing the educational process
forces the student to master the content of the educational programs qualitatively, and at the
same time ensures objective recognition of the results of studies in various educational
institutions in Uzbekistan and abroad, allows school graduates to prepare more seriously for
the final exams required for a higher educational institution.
The credit-modular system of organizing the educational process is a model of organizing the
educational process based on modular teaching technologies and credits or a combination of
credits of educational units. The credit-modular system, as a process of organizing education,
is a combination of modular teaching technologies and an assessment model based on credit
measurement. Its implementation as a whole is a multifaceted and complex system process.
The credit-modular principle emphasizes two main issues: ensuring independent work of
students; rating assessment of students' knowledge.
B. Usmanov and R. Khabibullaev state that the credit-modular system is a MODEL of
organizing the educational process based on modular teaching technologies and the unity of
ECTS credits as units of measurement of the student's educational load necessary for
mastering meaningful modules.
According to V. Urinov, the credit-modular system of organizing the educational process
forces the student to master the content of the curriculum in a qualitative way, thereby
ensuring objective recognition of the results of studies in various educational institutions in
Uzbekistan and abroad, and allowing school graduates to prepare more seriously for the final
exams required for higher education. Scientists say that the credit-modular system of
organizing the educational process is a model of organizing the educational process based on
a combination of modular teaching technologies and credits or credits of educational units.
The credit-modular system of education is planned in accordance with the need for
professional development once every five years and is mainly based on the independent
receipt by each student of a number of credits corresponding to the content of credit-modular
educational programs.
The main tasks of the credit-modular system are:
modular organization of the educational process;
a course (credit) that determines the costs of one subject;
assessment of student knowledge based on grades;
providing students with the opportunity to individually create their own educational programs;
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increasing the share of independent learning in the educational process;
the convenience of educational programs and the ability to change them depending on the
demand for specialists in the labor market, etc. Today, the credit-module system introduces,
first of all, a more advanced, modern, but understandable unit of measurement of education
into the higher education system of our country. According to it, the curricula of higher
education institutions (HEIs) are divided into various disciplines and modules that provide
for certain learning outcomes. Each discipline or module is reflected in a certain number of
credits depending on the amount of study load in it. For example, each discipline can be
reflected in an average of 5.6 or 7.5 credits, while the student must accumulate a certain
number of credits each semester, academic year, and after accumulating the appropriate
number of credits, he will be awarded a bachelor's or master's degree.
The use of the ECTS system has shown the following advantages:
simplified recognition of qualifications between higher education institutions;
transparency of student workload;
adaptability to reforms in the higher education system;
the flexibility of learning programs in the educational trajectory.
In the ECTS credit-module system, the number of credits per year is 60. Considering that one
academic year consists of 2 semesters, a student must accumulate 30 credits per semester
during his studies. Considering that a bachelor's program usually lasts 4 years, a student will
need to accumulate a total of 240 credits to obtain this degree, and 120 credits to complete a
master's program. Credits are not just numbers, each credit represents a certain amount of
learning workload that a student must complete and, as a result, the student has achieved
certain learning outcomes. That is, the structure of the ECTS credit-module system consists
of two necessary elements: learning workloads; learning outcomes. Only when these
elements are completed can a student obtain a certain number of credits in that subject.
In the ECTS credit-module system, 1 credit is equal to an average of 25-30 academic hours of
learning workload, that is; in order for a student to obtain the corresponding credits in a
particular subject, he must complete a certain amount of learning workloads. Learning
workload is the time required for a student to complete all systematic learning exercises and
actions aimed at achieving certain learning outcomes.
This means that the 25-30 hours of study load specified above for 1 credit is the total amount
of study time that a student is expected to spend on learning a subject. It includes not only
class time, but also the time the student spends studying the subject at home and in the library,
the time for exams, and all the systematic efforts the student makes to master this subject.
Each higher education institution usually determines in its internal regulations exactly how
many hours a credit load of 25-30 hours is, and these regulations are posted transparently on
the university website. If a subject is 6 credits, a student will need to complete 150-180 hours
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of study load during the semester to obtain the specified number of credits in this subject (25
• 6 = 150; 30 • 6 = 180). Therefore, in higher education institutions that have introduced a
credit-module system, students can have an idea of how much time they need to spend
on studying and learning each subject before they start their studies, based on the number of
credits assigned to each subject. This is also a form of transparency in education, while in the
current higher education system, students usually do not have such information.
In the ECTS credit-module system, for a student to earn credits in subjects and modules, it is
not enough to simply complete the learning load; after completing the appropriate number of
learning loads, he or she must also be able to demonstrate specific learning outcomes based
on them. Learning outcomes are the set of knowledge and skills that a student is expected to
learn, understand and be able to do as a result of completing the learning load. In the ECTS
credit-module system, each educational program (bachelor's, master's), subject or module
must have its own learning outcomes clearly defined in advance and a list of these learning
outcomes must be provided to students in advance. Then students begin their studies with a
preliminary understanding of what studying a particular educational program or a particular
subject in it can give them as a specialist. Then both the student and the teacher, who have
advance knowledge of the learning outcomes, focus all their efforts on achieving these results
during the program or semester.
The credit-module system performs two main tasks: First, continuing education on the basis
of academic mobility and flexibility based on credits received from another higher education
institution (or another faculty), and secondly, cumulative education. A student can receive
education at different intervals, change universities and in different periods. If some specific
outcomes do not have a specified validity period (for example, due to the obsolescence of the
course), credits are accumulated until the student has accumulated the required number of
credits for the relevant academic degree (bachelor, master). Of course, the possibility of
transferring credits and accumulating credits depends on the trust between universities and
the compatibility of the curricula.
The learning outcomes of a program or subject should be able to answer the following key
question: what can or should a student do based on the knowledge acquired in the program or
a specific subject within it? As you can see from this question, learning outcomes are not a
list of knowledge that a student has acquired during the program or a specific subject in it,
but rather what the student can do based on that knowledge. This requirement in the ECTS
credit-module system forms a practical, pragmatic approach to higher education.
Another important aspect of pre-determining learning outcomes is that it also acts as a filter
that cleans the curriculum from irrelevant and irrelevant subjects and modules for the
specialty. If the expected learning outcomes to be achieved in a subject and module are not
important for the student to become a specialist and do not serve this purpose, this subject
will have to be dropped from the curriculum.
Students and teachers may wonder how much of this total learning load falls on lessons and
classroom hours. The ECTS credit-module rules do not set a clear requirement or limit on
this issue. There are many reasons for this. For example, educational processes or modules do
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not always include classroom hours, for example, pre-graduation internships, diploma
projects and similar educational elements and modules in the curriculum. So, such
educational elements do not have classroom hours, but when we analyze the practice of
universities operating in the ECTS credit-module system, we can observe that in most of
them, the ratio of classroom and independent study hours in subjects and modules with
classroom hours is on average 40% to 60%. In other words, this ratio corresponds to 1:1.5.
That is, for every 1 hour of class assigned to a particular subject, a student will need to
independently study and prepare for it for one and a half hours outside of class.
In this case, if the university has set a study load of 30 hours for 1 credit, 12 hours of it (30 •
40 % = 12) are classroom hours, and 18 hours (30 • 60 % = 18) are independent study hours
for the student. Based on this distribution, if we determine the study load of a 6-credit subject,
then in order to obtain the specified credits for this subject, a student will need to complete 72
hours ((30 • 6) • 40 % = 72)) of classroom lessons and 108 hours ((30 • 6) • 60 % = 108)) of
independent study load at home and in the library during the semester. In the ECTS credit-
module system, one classroom academic hour is equal to 45-60 minutes. From the above
rules, we can understand that in the ECTS credit-module system, the concept of student
learning time is not limited to the concept of lesson time, but is measured by the total time
spent by the student on learning. It also indicates that the source of knowledge is not only the
teacher or the audience. In short, in the credit-module system, the concept of learning time is
approached not from the teacher's point of view, but from the student's point of view.
Therefore, modern dynamic life requires the training of specialists of higher education
institutions who have the following abilities:
able to quickly adapt to changing life and professional situations, taking into account the
analysis of existing problematic issues;
ready to constantly update knowledge, self-development, create new knowledge, skillfully
apply knowledge in practice to solve professional tasks;
able to manage the growing flow of information, analyze, transform information, use modern
technologies in their professional activities and in their own lives;
have critical and creative thinking;
be sociable, communicative, able to work in diverse teams;
be proactive in achieving their goals, etc. Indeed, such specialists can be competitive in the
modern labor market, as well as contribute to the competitiveness of their enterprises,
institutions and organizations, as well as create their own business, adapt to various changes
in the job profile and constantly improve their knowledge, skills and qualifications. Therefore,
the higher education system is faced with the important problem of organizing the
educational process of students in the context of the expressed theses.
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In other words, society aims to independently orient future specialists in the flow of
information, constantly improve their knowledge, creatively approach any changes, and bring
them to the level of non-traditional and high-quality solutions to emerging problems.
B. Usmonov, V. Urinov noted that the credit-modular system of organizing the educational
process forces the student to master the content of higher education qualitatively, thereby
ensuring the objective recognition of learning outcomes in various educational institutions
and European countries. It can be noted that credit-modular training was formed in the
process of evolution of the educational sphere and is one of the results of a long search for the
most effective forms and means of educational activity.
References:
1. Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan No. О'РК-637 dated September 23, 2020 “On
Education”. www.lex.uz
2. Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan No. 4947 dated February 7, 2017
“On the Strategy of Actions for the Further Development of the Republic of Uzbekistan”.
www.lex.uz
3. Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan No. PF-5847 dated October 8,
2019 “On Approval of the Concept of Development of the Higher Education System of
the Republic of Uzbekistan until 2030”. www.lex.uz
4. Address of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev to the Oliy
Majlis dated January 25, 2020. www.uza.uz
5. Bologna Process: poisk obnosti evropeyskikh sistem vo’shego obrazovaniya (proekt
TUNING) G’ Pod nauch. ed. V.I.Baydenko. - M.: Issledovat. tsentr problem kachva
podki spetsov, 2006. -211p.
6. Usmonov. B.Sh., Khabibullaev R.A. Organization of the educational process in higher
educational institutions in the credit-module system. Textbook. T.: “Tafakkur”
publishing house, 2020. 120 p.
7. U’rinov.V. ECTS credit-module system in higher educational institutions of the Republic
of Uzbekistan: basic concepts and rules. Textbook. – T., Ma’naviyat, 2020.
