Apuntes Navigators Certificate Open ICDL

De Wiki Educalibre

Do you find it appropiate and relevant to adapt the Navigator's or other OpenICDL certification to a professional competence certification? The question refers that the Navigator's seems like a ICDL certification alternative, related to ICT procedimental and conductual learning.

I do think that its appropriate to map the curriculum of the OpenICDL to a professional competence certification. The Navigators certificate is based on the ICDL curriculum. To acquire ICDL certification - learners must be evaluated by an official ICDL examination centre. Fortunately the ICDL is vendor independent, hence the Navigators certificate will teach the ICDL competence requirement using free software and free content.

COL has particular expertise in the design of learning materials for distance education delivery and we will add value to the existing OpenICDL by improving the educational design of the materials. Of course the content will be freely available under a CC-BY-SA license.

Our aim is to widen access opportunities to ICT skills development by developing high quality learning materials based on the ICDL curriculum. It also has the advantage that it will teach these skills using free software (Ubuntu as the OS, OpenOffice and Firefox) - this way learners will not need to purchase expensive licenses for proprietary software or be tempted into using pirate software.

If so, what would be the requierement for Enlaces to be part of OpenICDL, COL's certification?

First - there is no requirement for Enlaces to be part of the Navigators Certificate - this is being developed as free content in the spirit of the Open Source philosophy. All our course development will be done on WikiEducator - so it will be entirely open. That said, I welcome community participation - as I firmly believe that by working together we can benefit from each others experience and we will ultimately end up with a better product than working alone.

You can find a detailed schedule of developments thus far under the "draft schedule" heading here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Commonwealth_Computer_Navigator%27s_Certificate

So far I have the following participants, who COL will be supporting to assist with the conversion of Modules:

1. Indira Gandhi National Open University in India (2 Modules)
2. University of the West Indies, Jamaica (1 Module)
3. University of the Western Cape (1 Module)
4. PennState University (1 Module) - They are donating their services
5. Open Polytechnic of New Zealand for the Pacific region (Instructional design and module coordination)

On the matter of certification, COL is not a certification body. We are an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. This is why we focused on an existing certification which would make it easier for local institutions to utilise the ICDL/ECDL certification - if so required. However, in this project I have specified that each participation institution must institute procedures for local certification according to the respective institutions and national > > qualification frameworks. Therefore, when the project is completed, it would be possible for a learner to enrol, for example, with the University of the West Indies and receive the Computer Navigators Certificate issued by this institution as an alternative to the ICDL examination which is very expensive for the developing world.