The Dublin I-T Shape Meeting
The third IT-Shape meeting, attended by representatives of the 10 project partners, took place on 24th and 25th October 2014 at the Irish Computer Society in Dublin. The Dublin meeting followed the Italian meeting which took place in April in Pontedera. The meetings occur regularly to evaluate, discuss and set new activities to be carried out by the project group.
Jim Friars (CEO of the Irish Computer Society and Chairman of the EDCL Foundation) formally welcomed Mária Hartyányi (iTStudy Hungary Ltd) and the Hungarian and Italian delegation to Ireland.
He said he was delighted that EUCIP Certification was being introduced into Hungary, and he hoped it would make a positive contribution to the Vocational Education and Training sector.
The meeting opened with Mária Hartyányi: (Project Coordinator, ITStudy Hungary Ltd), presenting an activity progress report, where she announced that the project results planned for the first year were completed and satisfactory.
Mária emphasised the value of EUCIP Core, where she showed how it defines the “T”-Shaped profession concept of IT specialisation extended to include business knowledge and skills.
EUCIP System in the World
Pierfranco Ravotto (AICA) provided a presentation on the recognition of the EUCIP Core system in Europe and in the World. He said that the EUCIP Core qualification is at the beginning, in its infancy stage. In Italy there are approximately 1000 exams taken each year but year on year this number is steadily growing. He demonstrated how EUCIP currently aligns to e-CF (the common European eCompetence Framework supported by the European commission). He predicts that in the next few years, CEPIS (the representative body of national informatics associations), whose main aim is to promote the development of the information society in Europe, will be working to better align EUCIP to e-CF.
Planning Sustainability of the Results
Mihály Kocza presented the results of a Hungarian survey involving the owners of SME’s. The main question being asked was “Are company owners interested in employing IT staff with EUCIP Core qualifications?”. This was a significant survey with 700 companies being asked to take part. 57 organisations responded. He reported that the result was very positive from the respondents, with 38% having IT employees without any certification or formal qualification. He concluded that this group would be a suitable target group.
Dr Imre Balogh (University of West Hungary), carried out an interesting study on matching the EUCIP Core syllabus to that of the Business IT curricula (BSc level) course currently being run at his university. The purpose was to see how closely they aligned to each other and to identify any gaps. He was satisfied to report that between 70 – 90% of the EUCIP Core syllabus is covered by the students taking the Business IT course. In his opinion, students studying Business IT could be prepared for taking EUCIP exams with some extra hours of training. Another interesting finding was that when asked, the students were in favour of adding a European recognized certificate to their qualifications. They believed it would add value alongside their degree.
Localisation of EUCIP Core Certification in Hungary
EUCIP core is divided into three modules, PLAN, BUILD, OPERATE.
Three Expert Groups were setup to review each of these modules for suitability for the Hungarian VET sector. Each module group was to:
1. Evaluate the syllabus and mapping to the content in the three English course books.
2. Consider on how practice orientated are the modules
3. Review the QTB (question test base) in terms of its currency and level of difficulty.
4. Compare the content to current courses being offered to Hungarian business IT students.
Reports of Expert Groups
Group 1 - Plan
Mária Hartyáni ( iTStudy Hungary Ltd), who is a member of the PLAN expert group, reported on well the module aligns to the HNRQ (Hungarian National Registry of Qualification). She said that the Plan module is not a typical business module nor a typical IT module, but more a hybrid course. She explained that this will mean teachers from both fields will need to collaborate to produce optimum resources when preparing students.
Barna Éles (business teacher of OJSZIGK), the leader of the PLAN expert group estimated the Plan module would take 144 hours to teach (4 hours/week). He explained that students would find the technical terms and abbreviations used in the English course text their main difficulty, but the group agreed that as English is the universal language used in the IT industry, the English abbreviations ought to be retained.
Group 2 – Build
Erika Manyhárt the leader of the BUILD expert group said 100 hours training would be required to prepare students for the Build module but much of the content could be integrated into subjects currently being taught to IT Students. She felt that the test itself was based on theory with no practical questions and that she would have liked to have a mix between practical and theoretical assessment. She also said that some of the content refers to older technology and practices and would need to be updated. It was agreed to compile a list to forward to the ECDL Foundation for review and possible updating.
Group 3 - Operate
Dr Ildikó Balassa (SZÁMALK) is the leader of the OPERATE expert group. She said that the content was about 90% current and provided the students with enough knowledge to answer every question in the test. Again, as with the previous presenter, she reported that some of the content needed to be changed to bring it up to date and that she would compile a list to submit to the ECDL Foundation to review. She was pleased to report that the Hungarian IT System Administrator training currently covers the OPERATE syllabus to between 80 -90%. She said that the EUCIP OPERATE could be offered to students undertaking the IT Administrator course who would like to have a recognized European qualification.
Meeting Day 2
Welcome
Maria welcomed the project team to the second day of the meeting, and said she hoped everyone enjoyed the group dinner in the Trocadero Restaurant the previous evening.
eLearning in Ireland
David Cleary (ICS) started the day 2 proceedings with a short demonstration of the online learning system employed by the Irish Computer Society. He followed up with a suggestion for a multilingual solution where the students can switch between English and Hungarian while attempting to answer questions in the practice test. He suggested that by using this method, students will become familiar with terms and expressions and question structures.
CLIL (Content and Language Integration Learning)
Judith Gyulavári (NJSZKI) presented on CLIL (Content and Language Integration Learning). She began her presentation with an introduction to CLIL, and she explained that in Hungary it is run as an intensive language year, and that the question of who should teach this course is often asked, IT teachers or Language teachers or both? She said that content that is geared towards the specialist subject of the student is more interesting for them. This led to an engaging discussion in the group.
Adriana Fasulo (ISP), gave some details about using CLIL methodology at her school and that it was currently being run as an experiment or pilot. She also told the group that all EUCIP students at her school take the core module exams through English.
Iidikó contributed to this discussion, saying that her school had developed e-learning materials for teachers to teach English to IT students and she offered to make them freely available for this project.
In conclusion, it was agreed that the Hungarian partners would develop support materials for VET teachers on how to use CLIL in preparing students for the EUCIP core exams.
Decisions Planning Future Actions
The rest of the day 2 working session was spent making important decisions and planning next steps.
Decisions
- Exams
The deadline for EUCIP Core exams in Hungary was set to the period between Feb – Apr 2015. The agreed plan is to test 60 students through English and 80 students through Hungarian.
2. Certificates Mary Cleary (ICS) suggested that to be able to receive a certificate for each module completed would be a great benefit. She said that she asked the Foundation to consider and was now delighted to report that this will be possible as the Foundation have agreed to having individual module certificates for the purpose of this project only. This means that a student is eligible for a Certificate for each of the Core exams passed as well as ITAF.
3. Localisation of EUCIP Core Syllabus and tests - The ECDL Foundation has agreed to review the syllabus and test items and to update as appropriate.
4. Localisation of EUCIP Core Textbooks - It was agreed to produce three separate text books for PLAN, BUILD and OPERATE.
5. EUCIP Core Structure Review - The group was concerned that the EUCIP Core structure may be modified over the next year. Mary said that the probability for this happening is not high, but that the Hungarian partners should take into consideration is the concept of e-CF during adaptation and localization.
The issue 5. edited by David Clearly, from The Irish Computer Society. You can read more about it here:
