eSkills

Proyectos

IT Administrator Competences Development and Acknowledgement

15 Mayo 2013

The project intends to transfer the EUCIP Competence System, in particular the IT Administrator profile and related Full and Fundamentals certifications, to technical schools. Developed by CEPIS at European level and run by AICA in Italy and FEE in Spain, it is a “competence-system” which addresses companies and informatics professionals.

ITACA promotes the cooperation between informatics schools and companies to improve the training system quality and make students acquire competences and certifications useful to enter the world of work.

 

It’s composed by:

1. a detailed syllabus

2. a self-assessment tool to identify a “proximity competence profile” and related training gap

3. automatic exams assessing knowledge (and test simulations)

4. practical exams assessing skills.

 

The ITACA project intends to:

 

  • Plan a learning path in the computer study field based on the EUCIP IT Administrator syllabus and organised in Units of Learning Outcomes following the ECVET model. Such a learning path aims providing students knowledge, skills and attitudes required and is based on project-work activities and placements in companies in the view of creating a suitable context where to develop competences.
  • Promote a pilot course based on collaborative online activities addressing about 30 Italian teachers who, interacting with companies, define such a learning path in details.
  • Deliver cascade training courses to Italian and Hungarian teachers make them familiar with such a model so that they could activate IT Admin courses for their students
  • Certificate teachers and accredit schools as IT Administrator awarded bodies
  • Pilot the learning model devised with students in Italy and Hungary
  • Promote a community of teachers which will keep the debate on competence-based learning and the cooperation with companies alive
  • Present the project results to relevant stakeholders in Italy, Hungary and Spain to obtain public validation and recognition of the IT Admin EVET points.
eSkills
Blogs

Post-doctoral Researcher vacancy on ICT for Learning, Skills and Open Educational Resources

15 Marzo 2013
OER, OER, ICT in education, lifelong learning, eSkills
Blogs

International Girls in ICT Day 2013

08 Marzo 2013
ICT competences, gender, eSkills
Directorio

Assessment of Learning in Digital Social Networks

07 Marzo 2013

This paper summarizes ATC21S assessments for ICT Literacy, including a description of data (collected in Fall 2011 studies in Australia, Finland, Singapore and the U.S.) and discussion on how assessment outcomes can be reported. ATC21S aims to help educators around the world equip students with 21st century skills to succeed in career and college goals, including problem-solving, digital literacy and working together in learning communities.

eSkills, new skills, Skills, networks, collaborative networks, ICT
Directorio

A Framework for Teachable Collaborative Problem Solving Skills

04 Marzo 2013

 

Collaborative problem solving draws upon social and cognitive skills that can be analysed in classroom environments where they are both measurable and teachable. This paper provides a conceptual framework of collaborative problem solving that is informed by findings from fields of research as diverse as cognitive science, education, social psychology and psycholinguistics.
eSkills, new skills, Skills, Creativity
Directorio

Policy Frameworks for New Assessments

28 Febrero 2013

The ultimate goal of the project is to move from small marginal pilot projects to implementing new forms of assessment within a coherent teaching and learning system. This paper focuses on the reform needed in school and government systems to achieve this shift.

Many nations around the world have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction, and assessments with the intention of better preparing all children for the higher educational demands of life and work in the 21st century. While large-scale testing systems in some countries emphasize multiple-choice items that evaluate recall and recognition of discrete facts, there is growing use of more sophisticated approaches in many countries. These approaches include not only more analytical selected response items but also open-ended items and curriculum-embedded tasks that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and communicate more extensively, both orally and in writing. A growing emphasis on project-based, inquiry-oriented learning has led to increasing prominence for school-based tasks in state and national systems, including research projects, science investigations, use of technology to access information and solve authentic problems, development of products, and presentations about these efforts.
 
This paper briefly describes the policy frameworks for assessment systems in Australia, Finland, Singapore and the United Kingdom, with special attention to identifying where assessment of 21st century skills has been or may be developed in assessment systems that report information at the national or state, as well as local, levels. Identifying the role of 21st century skills within these assessment systems serves two purposes. First, this process furthers knowledge about distinct approaches to the integration of 21st century skills in countries with different educational governance systems. Second, it provides information about how assessment systems work within the broader policy landscape of each country that determines student learning opportunities through the construction of policies governing teacher education and development, as well as curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
 
new skills, Skills, eSkills, change in higher education, policy recommendations
Directorio

New Assessments and Environments for Knowledge Building

28 Febrero 2013

This paper looks at innovative ways to improve the development of 21st-century skills in students both individually and in groups, considering both formal and informal learning opportunities.

In this paper we review literature on knowledge-creating organizations to identify sequences leading from entry-level 21st century skills to mature levels of the skills defined by the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project. We suggest a developmental scheme to allow students and teachers in any classroom to find a starting point and advance along dimensions identified. In a fully developed knowledge building environment, the ways people and ideas interact are critical to the integration of deep understanding, knowledge creation, and practical action. After proposing a framework for moving toward high-end knowledge environments we consider basic principles of learning and developmental trajectories relevant to them. We distinguish two approaches: “working backward from goals” and “emergence of new skills.” We discuss how modern technologies can help integrate and enhance these different approaches, how formative assessments can be used to increase the pace of innovation, and how a broader systems perspective might inform large-scale summative assessments.
 
An analytic framework, with developmental trajectories defined by 21st century skills, is provided for analyzing environments in light of the extent to which they support knowledge creation. Our goal is to provide a scheme comprehensive enough to identify starting points, as well as pathways to higher-order achievements for all, from elementary through to tertiary education, and applicable to out-of-school contexts, so as to support an inclusive model of 21st century knowledge building. We also aim to distinguish efforts that prepare students for work in knowledge-creating organizations after they leave school from those that aim to transform schools to operate as knowledge-creating organizations in their own right. We end with suggestions for new initiatives to help advance
education for a knowledge-building society.
 
eSkills, new skills, Skills, active learning, formal learning, Informal learning, Education
Directorio

Technological Issues

28 Febrero 2013

This paper identifies and analyzes various technological problems in computer-based assessment of 21st-century skills, with suggested solutions.

This paper reviews the contribution of new information-communication technologies to the advancement of educational assessment. Improvements can be described in terms of precision in detecting the actual values of the observed variables, efficiency in collecting and processing information, and speed and frequency of feedback given for the participants and stakeholders. It reviews previous research and development in two ways, describing the main tendencies in four continents (Asia, Australia, Europe and the US) and summarizing research on how technology advances assessment in some crucial dimensions (assessment of established constructs, extension of assessment domains, assessment of new constructs and in dynamic situations).

 

As there is a great variety of applications of assessment in education, each one requiring different technological solutions, the paper classifies assessment domains, purposes and contexts and identifies the technological needs and solutions for each. The paper reviews the contribution of technology to the advancement of the entire educational evaluation process from authoring and automatic generation and storing items through delivery methods (Internet-based, local server, removable media, mini-computer labs) and forms of task presentation made possible with technology to response capture, scoring and automated feedback and reporting.

 

The paper also reviews some special cases for which new technologies have enabled significant advances (e.g. assessments of students with special educational needs, assessment of collaborative skills and group achievement) and discusses the validity issues raised by the application of the new technolgies (e.g. factors influencing achievements when working with technological tools, the question of transferability of skills measured in a virtual environment).

 

Finally, the paper identifies areas where further research and development is needed (migration strategies, security, availability, accessibility, comparability, framework and instrument compliance) and lists themes for research projects feasible in the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project.

 

new skills, Skills, computer, eSkills
Blogs

Filling the gaps: e-Skills and Education for Digital Jobs

25 Febrero 2013
eSkills, Education and jobs, ICT competences
Artículos

The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachers

22 Febrero 2013

This article was originally published by Kate Borthwick and Alison Dickens on the online Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, volume 9, issue 1.

The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachers ran from 2010 – 2011 and was a collaboration between Southampton City Council and two universities in the UK. The project’s aim was to create, publish online and share a collection of open access digital resources for community-based language teachers in the Southampton area.

 

The project addressed a particular problem: the scarcity of up-to-date, online resources for community languages. These languages are often learnt in informal situations, and teachers are often reliant on creating their own materials but have limited access to training. Engaging with open practice offers this group the potential benefits of improving their access to resources, enhancing digital literacy and practice, and gaining insights into alternative pedagogical approaches through using existing online repositories.

OER, OER, language learning, eSkills