Abstract:

The issues of timely development of educational programs that meet the rapidly changing needs of the labour market are becoming more and more significant for many national education systems. ICT globalization and increase in shortfalls of ICT personnel have contributed to application of world's best practices and standards for excellence in human resource management.

The paper presents the Russian experience of development of educational programs for training and independent assessment of ICT personnel qualification. It takes both European experience and national specificities into account.

The European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) has been chosen and analyzed as a best practice. The e-CF has been developed by the CEN (European Committee for Standardization) Workshop on ICT Skills and has been published as CEN Workshop Agreements (CWAs).

The most important feature of the Russian education system is a presence of two sets of standards, which contain national requirements for academic (Federal State Educational Standards) and professional (professional standards) training. Harmonization and implementation of the requirements of these sets of standards is the main difficulty in the design of educational programs.

Original method for multi-level and multi-issue harmonization of all elements of the educational programs with national, regional and international standards is used for the design of educational programs. That decision is based on the formalization of concepts «skill» and «proficiency». The main element of the harmonization in the presented method is a concept named «professional competence» in the syllabus of discipline. It definitely compares both with the concept «generalized labour function» from a professional standard in the formation of the specialist profile at the national level and the concept named «dimension 2» as applied to e-CF. Also the authors used systems analysis, process approach, quality management methods, functional modelling.

The problems of automation in the development of educational programs for multi-level training of ICT personnel can be successfully solved using the set of function models submitted by the authors. The function models support the implementation of the process approach to design and to conformity assessment of the program's content with the requirements of standards. The proposed approach enables creation of general specialist profile for any educational program in the automatic mode through aggregation of professional competencies specified in at least one of educational discipline from this educational program. In the same way the specialist assessment profile can be formed by specifying range of experience levels for particular elements of the assessment tools fund. The experience levels correlate with the «dimension 3» concept as applied to e-CF.

The implementation of presented process approach will enhance the integration and the quality of training of Russian ICT personnel into the worldwide ICT sector, reflecting one of the most visible trend of the modern education – a shift in public attention from academic education issues to professional training issues.

Contents:
Introduction
1) Analysis of the European e-Competence Framework
2) Features of the Russian education system
3) Function models for implementation of the process approach to design and to conformity assessment of the program's content
4) The specialist profile
5) Practical approbation
Conclusion
Bibliography

Keywords:

Education, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), specialist, skills, qualification, profile, educational program, standard.