VOCTADE

Development of knowledge in the field of
vocational training at a distance in the European Union
line

March 3rd, 1998

FUKUR 0.4

Helmut Fritsch
(click here to download FUKUR 0.3, the database for German courses)

FUKUR as an element of Voctade

One of the aims of the Voctade project has been to acquire knowledge about the actual situation in the field of distance education in Europe. There are several strategies that can be followed - one of them is to collect all available data about courses that might be relevant for vocational training. Not only the courses known to be of curricular relevance for university studies but moreso all those courses in distance education which have a connection to the field of training for jobs.

Strategically there are several paths to gain knowledge about distance education courses: For the collection of data about distance education in the countries of the European Union thereshould be a method which assures that there are partners who have the national knowledge about the institutions and programs offered.

History

The collection of course descriptions often is a project too big for a national endeavour, since the information about the single course changes faster than the total number of courses and/or enrolments. Distance education courses can be grouped according to many different characteristics: Ten years ago a working group of the EADTU (European Association of Distance Teaching Universities) met several times to follow the strategy of course collection for its purposes: at that time database development was still not widespread enough so that this initiative turned out to be a dead-end street. Also the strive of a supra-national body to gain identity for itself, to gain as an institution a valuable position of its own in the concert of other bodies like SATURN and EUROSTEP) and last not least the illness of one of the main players in this project lead to its termination as far as I know. In almost each member institution of the EADTU someone should have been appointed to collect and feed in the data into a common template; the outcome of this database - called EDDIE ( European Database on DIstance Education) was poor.

EDDIE (of EADTU)

EDDIEs first steps was the construction of the common template: we were looking for a foil under which all the European courses could be subsumed: Some of the members of the group found that the template already in action with the ICDL (International Centre for Distance Learning) - together with an institution template and a literature template were sufficiently detailed and feasible for the work. It was a long process and took years to convince the members of the EADTU working group that the wheel need not be invented again. Here is a list of the items included in this database ( EADTU proposal 1991):

course code and title code, title
subject from list
institution name of offering institution (as in institutional entry)
country
course level - classification (s) chosen from ICDL list, (level in terms of national education and training system etc. see preparatory manual)
course description and other academic information, aims and objectives
description of subject content: required texts, type of course, prerequisites structure of course - duration of parts - organisation of content, (see preparatory manual)
original languages of course - translations available
assessment and examinations
media and methods- specify media used (ICDL suggestions on phrases)
tutorial support - obligatory components: attendance at study or training centre or vacation - tutorials or summer schools
administrative information - name of responsible of producing institution / department / unit or faculty
name of contact person - address, telephone, fax, telex, e-mail, application / registration dates
fees paid / price
length of course - number of study hours - maximum number of participants
credit values - credit recognition - use of course in other institutions name(s) of author(s) of the course
availability of course material to other institutions - copyrigfht information - copyright status (institutional, world-wide,any component, owned by third party, any constraints on adaptation)
revision information - (see preparatory manual)
evaluative information available (see preparatory manual
data entered - date of entry - identity of entering person/authority - published source of information (prospectus etc.) if any

This was the proposal for EDDIE - reality showed that this course template would not work out of two reasons:

Not all institutions had course descriptions included in their prospectus - so the first task, to describe the content of a course already meant an effort in work - and even in translating the existing course descriptions into English - not to mention the difficulties with unusual catgories, e.g. "credit value" in a system where credits are not foreseen or for courses which do not belong to a set standard curriculum: So even the differences in the concept of higher education were an obstacle to entering data into such a database. I am in the possession of several course descriptions for a humanities courses sample of the FernUniversität from 1991, all information given there is:
```
· title of course, number,
· author(s)
· number of study hours
· level of study (basic, advanced, third level)
· text of course description
```
This database was launched in September 1991 in Athens, in a file explaining the collection procedure. EADTU stated that „Priorities for Programme Commitee members would be course transfer, course exchange, adaption and transformation. Identifying opportunities for future joint course productions and developing a programme of European studies are also priorities. (please note that all data is to be entered in English!)" So the collection of data seemed to be secondary to the political actions planned by the Programme committee.

ICDL database

Meanwhile the work of Keith Harry (ICDL) at Open University, financed by the Commonwealth went on and the database was frequently searched from all over the world. Thousands of courses, hundreds of institutional descriptions - also from countries not belonging to the Commonwealth - have been included. To my knowledge the ICDL database is one of the early functioning examples of sophisticated database construction for the public (developed by the former programmer in charge, Sean Dougherty, of the OU): This database has been produced also on CDROM for the last ten years with two updates each year!
Until last year (1996) access to the course-descriptions of this database was possible for everyone without charge via Telnet. Starting in fall 1996 this information can be obtained via the world wide web.ICDL database
Many European institutions are included in this huge database: some of them have put in their course data with detailed descriptions many promised to do so, but never did. Although the course descriptions with all the details had been (for printing purposes) developed and stored in digitized manner for about 10 years, a system as big as the FernUniversität did not manage to build a feasible database for net purposes and student guidance until the year 1996! So the initiative to collect all course data from all of Europe might even be too early today.

FUKUR

The acronym stems from German (Fern-Unterrichts-KUrs-Register) - the aim of such a database is

to have a collection of all course titles, grouped according to subject areas / languages etc.
to have a collection of all course descriptions with as much information as available
to have a searchable database according to whatever fields are normally used
original course description language but under different language-masks
to use the nomenclature of each country

FUKUR: the European dimension

For customer use in Europe it is necessary to be able to switch from one language to another - so the mask for enquiries should be presented at least in the language of the country where the courses come from but preferably also in most other European languages -
One of the main still unsolved problems will be the inclusion of Greek.
As a test-bed for such a database the situation in Germany seemed to be applicable: The database FUKUR 0.3 shows all available data not only for the FernUniversität but also for all vocational courses offered and acknowledged by the federal agency (originally set up for consumer-protection) responsible to control the minimum standard in the distance education market: Almost 2500 courses from more than 200 institutions are included there - some of the newer developments in universities (Web-based distance education, experiments financed by the federal govenment etc.) have not been included.

The first contacts to partner organisations in Europe have - bluntly speaking - failed.
There are different reasons for this: In the first place language competency of the members of our team, then a still missing database with reliable contact partners in each country: The management group advised us to have small contracts for the collection of data and for the entry into the database . This procedure could not be tested in 1997. The content side of the database has to remain open which means, that a software strategy is to be found to transform different categories - from each country in the worst case - into common search strategies.

Evaluation

The state of the art today is that it is possible to search the whole database for strings - This can be shown with the prototype. Also grouping according to major categories functions: all items may be grouped according to language, institution, course titles etc. One of the nice functions of this database is the filter - one always knows (and sees) whether a filter (several filter possibilities) is on or off. The main positive effect is the three-level design of information. You can call for a list of all courses in a field - and you get a line per course with as much information as possible. You also can ask for a group of courses: there you have a listing of several courses in the upper part of the screen window and a more detailed course description of only one ( the highlighted one) of the listed courses. On the third level you get full information on a single course on a single screen with the possibility to scroll in the course description window. Change of mask-language is possible at any time. The database architecture has been changed two times: Now available is version 0.3.

Outlook

What is still under development is a common mask for entry and a mask for changes in course description. The inclusion of more courses for the Voctade project is under way especially for the northern European countries. At this stage of development it is sure that by the end of the project the goal, to include all European countries, cannot be achieved. The strategy to do the entry of data centrally seems to be better than to have several people in different countries with different attitudes working on the same aspect: For central data entry it is enough to get descriptions of the courses in digitized form although it is better to have them in the format of a common database (dbase, Access or the like). The amount of money foreseen for this work has been far too small - the strategy to have someone full time in charge for such a project (see the "good practice" example of the ICDL) would be better. Nevertheless, we have not insisted on this centralized strategy because it seemed to be necessary in the long run to enable all partner countries to fill in the fast changing data under their own responsibility. One of the sub-goals of the project has been to make it directly available to the public via the WWW. The intermediate stage, though, a modern database running under Windows has been a valuable goal for the time of the project. Hagen, February 1998

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