Abstract:

The technical development and adoption of cloud services in organizations has been growing rapidly over the last years. Cloud services are applied in virtually all business domains and for many different purposes: from replacing the hardware on premises by deploying the infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model to enabling the use of a software without any installation by deploying the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The development of cloud services creates challenges for businesses in terms of recruitment problems, due to shortage of cloud skills on the job market. This in turn poses a challenge to the educational institutions that need to adapt their curricula to meet the new expectations of students and the society.

The adoption of cloud technologies increases rapidly. This poses challenges for the educational institutions that provide higher and further education in computer science, information technology and information systems. Educational institutions must choose which technologies to teach. They have to choose for example whether to include free and low-cost open-source solutions or services provided by large commercial companies or both. Also teachers' competences must be kept up-to-date, and they have to develop their skills and knowledge continuously. It is also necessary to know the competence needs of companies at a detailed level so that teaching can be designed to meet the requirements. This paper describes a curriculum development process that attempts to solve the above described challenges.

The curriculum development work was jointly done in two European Universities: Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences in Finland and Algebra University in Croatia. It consisted of the following phases:
i) Identifying industry needs for cloud skills through a systematic analysis performed together with companies.
ii) Mapping the results of the analysis to a standard classification (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations ESCO) and identifying possible new skills not in the vocabulary. Also adjustments to the definitions of the terms of the vocabulary based on the analysis were considered.
iii) Assessing the current cloud services curricula of the participating institutions with regard the identified skills.
iv) Identitying gaps in curricula and creating recommendations for the needed new content.
v) Producing a complete curriculum at the EQF (European Qualifications Framework) level 6 for the four cloud services job roles identified during phase i) of the process.

The result of the process is a complete curriculum covering four job roles related to cloud services. This curriculum may be used by educational institutions when they plan and implement their study offerings either for the degree students or for the students of further education. Also students may benefit from the curriculum when they gather their study modules from the offerings of several education providers. The curriculum itself is very useful, but maybe even more useful is the process for joint curriculum development and the experiences gathered from its implementation. These may serve as guidelines for future curriculum development endeavours in other areas of expertise and other levels of education.

Keywords:

Curriculum development, cloud services, ESCO, higher education.