Communications of the ACM
Informatics Higher Education in Europe: A Data Portal and Case Study
Credit: Gdańsk University of Technology
Informatics (also referred to here as computing or computer science) and information technology (IT) provide the underlying infrastructure for most societal systems and services. Training computing professionals who can imagine, design, build, and maintain such systems is, thus, an important goal of society. But what is the right training path? What are the skills to be taught considering the variety of jobs that are available on the market? Even if the body of disciplines around informatics and information technologies is maturing, definitive answers to the previous questions are still to come. Over the past 50+ years, informatics education programs have been created and have evolved in different ways. Depending on the specific circumstances occurring in a particular country, such as the state of the economy and the proclivity toward innovation, different and even contradictory goals have been set for these educational programs. Some of them have focused on training researchers, while others have focused on engineers, practitioners, or specialists in particular areas, such as automotive or aerospace. While it is very important to prepare graduates for the labor market with a variety of different skills, it is also crucial to be able to steer the education system in the long term, based on trustable and transparent impact analyses that are only possible through the collection of reliable data about the available curricula.
Key Insights
Within Europe, the differences in culture, language, traditions, and histories have certainly contributed to the formation of a diverse set of programs. This diversity can be a strength, but it also challenges data collection and analysis about such programs. Despite these challenges, policymakers and educational administrators aim to compare programs, identify strengths and weaknesses, design model programs, benchmark against the best programs, and design incentives for program improvements.
No entries found