Benefits of Collaboration between a University and a Vocational College

The paper describes the ways of collaboration between a technical university and a vocational college, its results in pedagogy, coordinated building of technical background, as well as sharing of facilities and lectures. We are focusing on the response from vocational college students and teachers who are involved in the shared education; the results are based on the survey performed during the current academic year. We are also going to mention strategic consequences with respect to the need for increasing attractiveness of technical disciplines and informatics in the society. The project involves many different activities. The first one consists in making the university laboratories open to vocational college students and teachers. Other planned activities include extended education of vocational college teachers at the university, so that they get the most recent knowledge in their areas of interest Then there is the plan for joint building of laboratories - experts from the university will prepare a set of laboratory workplaces and tasks in the premises of the vocational college and provide the necessary training to its teachers. The international dimension of the collaboration is reflected in a visit of vocational college students and teachers at the European NGN Centre in Bratislava, Slovakia - thanks to a traditional cooperation between CTU in Prague and STU in Bratislava. In order to introduce the university approach to education, there is prepared a special activity: supervising of students' individual and graduation projects by university lecturers. Students can hereby get new knowledge and dynamic impulses that may result in substantially higher quality of the projects. Students can also compete for special scholarships offered to the authors of the best projects. Another topic of the paper is related to the benefits that the described collaboration brings for the university.