FIT FOR THE FUTURE - MODERNISATION OF MASTER CURRICULUM IN ICT FOR ENHANCING STUDENT EMPLOYABILITY IN BELARUS

The Belarusian ICT industry grows fast, but the full potential has not been reached yet. To increase the ICT industry’s position as a central soil for the Belarusian economy, factors that hinder further growth, need to be identified and improved. Two of such factors are the inefficient dialogue between the ICT industry and higher education and a rather passive role of universities in framing trends on the market. This paper describes the concept and the implementation plan of the Erasmus+-project “Modernisation of Master Curriculum in ICT for Enhancing Student Employability in Belarus” (MaCICT). MaCICT is aimed to enhance the employability of ICT master students, foster entrepreneurship and establishment of SMEs in the ICT industry, and to upscale the position of higher education. For this, MaCICT updates the ICT study programmes to become more labor market and society oriented, practice-based, and student-centered. This forces universities to combine the traditional professional skills and competencies with soft and transferable skills and to focus more on multidisciplinary studies and internationalization of the study environment

Implementation of Task-Centric Holistic Agile Approach on Teaching Cyber Physical Systems Engineering

Industry and academia are facing a significant challenge to address the shortage of required workforce to enable the realization of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). To run CPS-engineering projects, engineers are required to have multi-disciplinary technical skills due to the complex nature of CPS that consist of hardware, software and communication systems in a single product. However, having technical skills are not enough since CPS-engineering projects are prone to failure due to lack of social skills of project members. To be prepared for their future work as CPS engineers, students need an opportunity to gather experience in projects in which they face real life situations. This paper proposes a novel task-centric holistic agile teaching approach for teaching CPS-engineering in realistic up-to-date industry-like scenario. This approach especially accentuates the development of social skills. The work presented in this paper describes the implementation of the approach and presents the results of the students’ feedback

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