Abstract:

This paper presents a new tool called TOPMOST for designing, planning and managing the mobility of Vocational Education and Training (VET) students. The database has been created by a partnership of six colleges across Europe with different national qualification frameworks but all focused in industrial maintenance. In order to create a functional database we had to design a procedure to create learning outcomes that are common to the whole partnership and that could be indexed on the database. This procedure, the database and the reports described in this paper. One of the innovative features of our work is what we call “horizontal vision” which means that the learning outcomes are defined directly by teachers from the competences derived from the qualifications but without considering the qualifications they are embedded on. The procedure shows important advantages: the learning outcomes created are linked directly to competences in the national curricula and mutual trust is enhanced. This leads to the validation and recognition after the mobility period, which is one of the requisites of European Commission in this type of programs. The last part of the paper presents the most useful reports of the TOPMOST tool: The mobility handbook and mobility matrix. The Mobility Handbook of each school presents the academic offer as well as the time of the year of mobility can be carried out. The Mobility Matrix allows selecting specific learning outcomes in a specific school to carry out punctual student mobility and it generates all the necessary documents according with high quality standards required by the European Credit Vocational Education and Training (ECVET) system.

Keywords:

ECVET, Competence, Learning outcomes, Student mobility, Vocational Training, Industrial Maintenance.