Abstract
There is a serious shortage of information technology (IT) engineers in Japan. Two closely related projects to solve the problem have been running at a goverment level: the Information Technology Engineers Examination (ITEE) and an educational material development activity nicknamed the CAROL project. ITEE is an official assessment test system of IT skills that has been run by the government since 1969. It attracts a large number of applicants and is recognized as an effective measure for hiring by Japanese management. CAROL consist of a curriculum and a set of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) courseware for entry-level IT engineers. The project has been active to achieve the CAROL curriculum, CAROL courseware development, and necessary revisions since 1986. The courseware propagation began in 1988. It initially focused on vocational schools, which had been the most significant suppliers of new IT hiring.
With several years of experience in the two parallel projects, we have recognized that they are not achieving the expected objectives. The “experience is the god” discipline of ITEE and the traditional curriculum of CAROL do not match.
The two systems for IT engineer development dearly need an integrated scheme. The inegration will not be easy because ITEE has a long history, with a large number of applications (some 500,000 in 1990). The CAROL project has to accept the requirements of Japanese vocational schools, which are the major portion of the expected customers. Moreover, they are not a part of official education and are not regulated by the government.
The 20-year-old ITEE has to develop a new discipline that reflects the innovation of IT technology and the growth of the IT industry.
A revision of the CAROL system is necessary so that it reflects the requirements of the real world and the new educational techniques.
The objective of this paper is to discuss the problems of integrating the two projects so that they can work together toward the common objective with better efficiency.
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Kamijo, F., Nakayashiki, M. Difficulties in integrating the IT qualification test and training curriculum. Journal of Systems Integration 2, 291–312 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02265079
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02265079