Cultural immersion aimed at improving professional integration in the Moroccan offshore industry

International audienceA young offshore software industry has grown up in Morocco. A network of 9 universities has set up two schemes promoting mobility towards France, strongly governed by the principle of driving skills gained back to Moroccan economic development. Academic objectives are related to software development and offshoring. A proportion of its success results from extra-academic factors: student selection, student support, internship supervision dedicated to a pre-employment in Moroccan companies. In all of these aspects, the University of Brest is acting as a hub between the various stakeholders, and its role could be compared to a placement agency, perhaps beyond the scope of its usual missions

An experience of young software engineers' employability in the Moroccan offshore industry

International audienceLast few years, French customers' demand for relocation of part of IT projects has allowed the emergence of an offshore software development industry in Morocco. A network of eight Moroccan universities and the University of Brest has set up a mobility scheme for Moroccan Master students. The OTI programme "Offshoring des Technologies de l'Information" is governed by the strong principle of driving skilled young engineers to the benefit of Morocco economic development. Education in Morocco and France is specialized on the issue of software development. The mobility scheme should help to reduce the socio-cultural distance that is inherent to offshore software projects. Without neglecting the need of the good quality of academic education, the programme success relies also on complementary actions: students' selection in Morocco; welcome and support in France; search, placement and follow-up of internships in France with pre-employment in Morocco. This article presents original points of the programme and an evaluation using criteria related to students' needs, business demand and institutions requirements

Introducing Problem-Based Learning in a Joint Masters Degree: Offshoring Information Technologies

International audienceA young offshore software industry has grown up in Morocco. The University of Brest has set up a network of major software companies and Moroccan universities, providing two mobility schemes towards France. Both schemes include a final internship on the French side of global companies, with pre-employment on the Moroccan side - a successful internship being the key that opens the door to recruitment. Student heterogeneity, and student reluctance to move towards a professional attitude are important barriers to employability. Hence, we redesigned a significant proportion of our technical courses to use a problem-based learning (PBL) approach. The PBL approach is illustrated through drawing parallels with the production of a TV series. Three aspects of the approach are presented: (i) set-up of the studio in which sessions are run, i.e. a real software project, its work products and its software development environment; (ii) pre-production tasks including the screenwriting of problem-based learning scenarios and the procurement of input artefacts; and (iii) acting, i.e. students' interpretation of characters (roles) and teacher direction