The development of a sustainable framework for an industry driven career-focused ICT curriculum in producing sought after ICT graduates

The employability of ICT graduates is a critical issue that needs to be addressed by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It can be argued that there are different challenges for higher education institutions, employers, and regulatory bodies around graduates’ readiness to join the modern workplace. The media and academic research is often critical on the matter of employability and continue to question the issues of (i) mismatches in the skills needed for and supply of ICT graduates; (ii) how faculty can keep themselves abreast with the changes in technology skills needed; (iii) how industry practitioners can be an integral part in the design and delivery of the curriculum that produces graduates with the global skills required by the workplace as demanded by Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Multi-National Companies (GNCs) and by the growing number of startups; and (iv) industry-academia collaboration for curriculum design and delivery. Typically, ICT remains the key driver and enabler of growth in all business sectors and is a recession-proof career; hence, all stakeholders should collaboratively design and deliver its curriculum. This study seeks to investigate the challenges Higher Education Institutions face in designing and delivering an industry-driven curriculum that would satisfy the expectations and requirements of students, academics, regulatory bodies, and employers. It aims to address the gaps and identify the mismatches in the expectations of these stakeholders. The goal is to develop a sustainable framework for curriculum design that contains strategic and measurable provisions in curriculum delivery, ensuring that experiential learning is genuinely embedded in the ICT curriculum. The research has achieved its research goal to develop a proposed framework from an extensive literature review and in-depth analysis of the findings obtained from online surveys and focus groups involving the different stakeholders – students, alumni, academia, and employers. This study contributes to the literature where minimal research is available on collaborative design and delivery of an ICT curriculum involving the different relevant stakeholders

International Student Projects and Sustainable Development Goals: A Perfect Match

Engineering Education is currently going through a transformation, driven by the need for educating better engineers and more engineers, and largely build on elements such as problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership EPIC (Improving Employability Through Internationalization and Collaboration) has combined all these elements, and demonstrated how international and interdisciplinary student projects, focusing on solving real-world problems related to sustainability, can be carried out in a setting where students mainly work together online. A total of 56 students from 7 EU and 2 international universities, with backgrounds ranging from Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to Textile Technologies and Business Informatics were working on 9 different projects throughout the spring of 2020. The paper presents the experiences from the setup and discusses some general recommendations for setting up this type of projects. The paper goes through the stages of defining and carrying out the projects: Defining the overall framework, identifying problems/project proposals in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, identifying the students and assigning students to projects, preparing students and supervisors, organising the physical kick-off seminar, and supporting the online collaboration. We also discuss evaluation and hand-over of the solutions, to ensure the projects have a lasting impact. We conclude that the sustainable development goals provide a highly motivating framework for interdisciplinary, international student projects based on problem-based learning. We also note that a careful design and execution of the all the preparatory stages are crucial in order for the projects to succeed, and discuss specific recommendations for these.</p

Valuing diversity and establishing an approach to supporting excluded groups

Minority students and minority employees in Higher Engineering Education experience inequality. For academic staff these inequalities impact their personal development and career progression. To continue to grow and for engineering education to thrive as a professional discipline we must encourage diversity within both the student and staff populations. This paper cautions against a simple notion of diversity, rather a truly diverse culture within engineering is needed, one in which there is diversity of opportunity, diversity of thought and diversity of experience. To enable a more inclusive environment to flourish we must understand the scale of the inequalities which exist. However, this paper demonstrates that there are significant limitations to the current diversity data within the UK which leaves room for under-reporting and over-generalising. In addition, there are cultural challenges which give further likelihood to non-disclosure and lack of self-reporting. This paper proposes that further research is needed into the true lack of diversity within engineering and describes one example of a ‘thought experiment’ conducted by the researchers to start unpacking the data and highlighting the scale of the issue

Project Management Competencies Leading to Technology Implementation Success at a Community College

The problem addressed in this study was to understand the knowledge gap between project management competencies available and those needed for successful implementation of technology projects at a community college. The purpose of the qualitative study was to evaluate, compare, and analyze the performance of project managers of 2 large technology projects in a specific community college with respect to each other and what was known about achieving project success at a public institution of higher education (IHE). The research questions for this study examined the competencies exhibited by the project leaders, the success parameters established for the projects, and how the individual project leaders were selected. The conceptual frameworks that supported this study were enterprise wide technology implementation, project management, success assessment, and public IHE operational structures. A comparative case study approach using responsive interviewing techniques with 10 stakeholders from each of the projects yielded dialog that was coded in combination with documentation and observation evidence using recognized competency standards. The relationships and significance of patterns found in this data were analyzed against the proposition that the level of project success is a function of the application of project management competencies of the project leader. The results identified 9 elements that characterized competencies specific to effective project outcome success within the context of the community college. The results contribute to positive social change include implementation of organizational project management initiatives that will enable community colleges to continue to serve a vital role in providing an affordable college education