ECVET - Application to mobility projects

Evolution of the country-to-country link toward a hierarchical referencing strategy
As already mentioned, a country-to-country comparison is a specification of a more general country-to-EQF scenario. For this reason, once tested the semantic engine on country-to-country relations, country-to-EQF matrices were developed. The advantage of this approach is that it allows experts to reduce the number of matrices to be filled in. In fact, for country-to-country comparison, it is necessary to draw n*(n-1)/2 matrices (where n is the number of countries involved in the comparison), while in a country-to-EQF scenario only n matrices have to be created. Thus, while dealing with six countries, the matrices to be drawn are reduced from fifteen to six. Moreover, according to this strategy, experts could work individually, because they only have to compare the qualification system of their own country with the EQF, without considering foreign training systems.

The search engine was therefore modified in order to take into account new weights; for each country, an EQF parameters configuration page was created (Figure 6). The reasoning behind the matrix is the following: if an element of a qualification (vertical axis) has the same meaning of an EQF element (horizontal axis), the corresponding cell should have to be filled with a "1" value, whereas if the two elements are not comparable, the value to be inserted would have to be a "0". Finally, if the elements show a similarity relation(but not an exact match), the cell would have to be filled with a value between zero and one. By analyzing weights inserted by the experts, the search engine is able to identify links between two concepts belonging to different countries. If an element of a qualification (e.g. an Italian Competenza) has the same meaning of an EQF concept (e.g. a Knowledge learning outcome) and an element of a qualification from another country (e.g. a French Compétence) has the same meaning of the considered EQF concept (the above Knowledge learning outcome), the two concepts (the Italian Competenza and the French Compétence) will be linked by an "exact match" relation.

Figure 6. Settings for the Italian IFTS system link to the EQF.