Revising ICT Programmes Through Learning Outcome Alignment: A Practical Exercise in Belarusian Universities

Abstract

EU-Funded ERASMUS Capacity Building in Higher Education project called ‘Innovative ICT Education for Socio-Economic Development (IESED 2017–2019)’ has been established in the consortium of five Belarusian (BY) Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as well as four HE partners across Europe. The goal of this project has been to enhance the competencies of ICT specialists and to improve the quality of ICT education across BY HEIs to meet the challenging needs of the social-economic development programme in the Republic of Belarus considering the Bologna process. In order to address this, the HEI partners worked towards updating selected study programmes in Information Resources Management, Mathematics and IT, Management with IT specialisation, Information Systems and Technologies, Informatics, compliance with the priorities of National Higher Education Strategy of Belarus. During the course of this project, some issues became apparent such as difficulties in developing generic course templates that could be adopted for years to come; limiting the reusability of course design, both level distinction and programme function of proposed courses which were not easy to identify when the focus was on competencies rather than mapping appropriate learning outcomes; and complications with evaluating credits especially with no clear fixed translation of course hours into credits. Finally as the Belarusian partners were required to follow the national ministry of education’s restrict guidelines, the recommended modifications by EU exert partners normally took longer to be approved and implemented. In this article, the authors (IESED project managers) reviewed this revision and implementation practice in order to achieve the IESED project goals in by resolving raised issues. They then moved on to discuss the formal methods that the project partners employed in order to revise and update the mentioned study programmes through learning outcome’s alignment.