Abstract:

This paper introduces 10 paths project that is a development and co-operation project of ICT education in 10 universities of applied sciences in Finland. The overall goals of 10 paths project are to improve the quality of ICT education and to increase the competitiveness of ICT sector in Finland. The national action that is aimed to implement is to reallocate resources from basic studies to more advanced ones. The reallocation of resources is intended to accomplish by organizing jointly online courses and course packages between the UASs. The courses and course packages deal with the studies related to the basic skills and knowledge of ICT sector.

The paper discusses the overall development process in 10 paths project. More particularly, this paper introduces, how the set of online courses and course packages have been jointly planned, produced and piloted. In addition to these, the process related to quality assurance of online content as well as pedagogical aspects will be introduced.

The educational objectives of the 10 paths -project are:
a) to improve the availability of online course content to be offered to students independently on place and time,
b) to increase the productivity of teachers/teaching by reducing distributed and fragmented preparation work and sharing the delivery of courses,
c) to improve the quality of ICT-education and decreasing the equality among UAS students.

In addition to these educational objectives, the project aims to develop a national model for organizing and operating online studies jointly between the UAS in Finland. During the project lifetime, the courses and course packages are delivered and tested through project Moodle.

This ongoing two-year project is coordinated by Tampere University of Applied Sciences and funded by Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland.

Keywords:

Online edcation, e-learning.