Using IT Education to Reveal New Horizons

A Large Scale Case Study on Digital and Social Inclusion

Marcel Vinicius Medeiros Oliveira

, Jair Cavalcanti Leite

, Adri˜ao Duarte D´oria Neto

Pablo Javier Alsina

, Jos´e Ivonildo Rego

, Izabel Hazin

and Jorge Tarc´ısio da Rocha Falc˜ao

Departamento de Inform´atica e Matem´atica Aplicada, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil

Departamento de Computac¸˜ao e Automac¸˜ao, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil

Departamento de Psicologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil

Keywords:

Digital and Social Inclusion, Technical Studies, Information Technology, e-Learning.

Abstract:

The development and the economical growth of a State in the sectors of Industry, Commerce (and e-

Commerce), and services are directly inﬂuenced by the investments on Information and Communication Tech-

nologies (ICTs). Emergent countries like Brazil have an extremely large deﬁcit in qualiﬁed ICTs employees.

Furthermore, despite being the 6th economy in the world, Brazil currently still presents a large number of

citizens below the poverty line even after a considerable improvement in recent years. In 2006, the Federal

University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), developed the Digital Metropolis project, whose main objective

is to provide means for the creation of a ICT Development Environment in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Cur-

rently, the project’s main supporting activity is the Technical Course on Information Technology. In this paper,

we describe the activities involving this course, its results and difﬁculties so far, and the future challenges we

aim to face in a very near future.

1 INTRODUCTION

The development and the economical growth of a

State in the sectors of Industry, Commerce (and e-

Commerce), and services are directly inﬂuenced by

the investments on Information and Communication

Technologies (ICTs). Using the infra-structure pro-

vided by such technologies, a local environment is

able to obtain the same technical results in a more

efﬁcient manner making it much more competitive in

today’s globalisedeconomy. Hence, reducing the pro-

duction and commercialisation costs highly depends

on a larger use of ICTs. This infra-structure is com-

posed by two important components: equipments and

stakeholders. First, desktop computers, servers, com-

puter programs and services, network and internet ac-

cess are imperative resources to organisations of all

sectors. Nevertheless, these resources are only useful

if qualiﬁed people exist for both projecting, installing

and maintaining these resources, and using them at

the ﬁnal end of the process.

Most of the emergent countries like Brazil have an

extremely large deﬁcit in qualiﬁed ICTs employees.

Recently, an study conducted by Softex Brazil (Sof-

tex, 2010) projected a scenario in which this deﬁcit

increases considerably from 70,000 open jobs in 2010

up to something between 140,000 and 200,000 open

jobs at the end of 2013. If these projections are

conﬁrmed, all economic sectors in Brazil will have

their competitiveness deeply affected since, nowa-

days, ICTs are transversal to all productive sectors.

Despite being the 6th economy in the world,

Brazil currently still presents a large number of cit-

izens below the poverty line even after a consider-

able improvement in recent years. In recent research

published in (IBGE, 2010), the Brazilian Institute

for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), indicated that

16,27 million (8,5%) Brazilian citizens live in ex-

treme poverty. Furthermore, current Educational In-

dexes like the IDEB (INEP, 2012) presented a consid-

erable improvement (from 3.8 to 5.0 in the last seven

years), but are still far from indexes considered ac-

ceptable for a developed country. More speciﬁcally,

in Rio Grande do Norte, the index has been histori-

cally below the national average (from 2.7 in 2005 to

4.1 in 2012).

In this context, the Federal University of Rio

Grande do Norte (UFRN) developed the Digital

Metropolis project in 2006 with the support of local

and national government. The project’s main objec-

603

Vinicius Medeiros Oliveira M., Cavalcanti Leite J., Duarte Dória Neto A., Javier Alsina P., Ivonildo Rego J., Hazin I. and Tarcísio da Rocha Falcão J..

Using IT Education to Reveal New Horizons - A Large Scale Case Study on Digital and Social Inclusion.

DOI: 10.5220/0004344606030611

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 603-611

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

tive is to provide means for the creation of an ICT

Development Environment in Rio Grande do Norte,

Brazil. In this process, it is imperative to contribute

with the formation on ICT of qualiﬁed individuals

that will reduce the lack of employees previously de-

scribed. The Digital Metropolis embraces this cause

but adds to it a strong sense of social and digital inclu-

sion: the project’s main supporting activity to date is

the Course on Information Technology whose 70% of

students (ageing between 15 and 19) are from public

schools.

In this paper, we describe the Course on Infor-

mation Technology of the Digital Metropolis, which

aims at providing professionals with high qualiﬁca-

tion in ICT whilst promoting social and digital inclu-

sion. For that, our courses have a large scale approach

in which over 2,400 students have been accepted in

the last two years. In 2013 alone, this is the number

of students that will be starting the course, hence, re-

sulting in 4,800 admissions in the last 4 years.

This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2

we present an overview of the project as a means to

contextualise the Course on Information Technology,

which constitutes the main focus of this paper. The

course’s history and detailed descriptionare presented

in Sections 3 and 4, respectively. Among the course

details, we describe the instrument of selection of tal-

ents (prospection), the structure of the course, its exe-

cution mode, the didactic material, the student’s eval-

uation, and some statistics on the course’s execution.

The Section 5 describes the initiative of our Institute

to stimulate our students to keep their intellectual de-

velopment by either taking one of our BSc courses

as their next academic steps, or by innovating on ide-

alised products on a project incubation. Finally, we

draw our conclusions and discuss future work in Sec-

tion 6.

2 THE SUPPORTING AXIS OF

THE DIGITAL METROPOLIS

INSTITUTE

The Digital Metropolis was founded with the mission

of promoting the interaction University-Society by

complementing its functions in the axis of Education,

Research and Extension on ICTs. This integration

takes place in partnerships with the public, private

and service sectors of society and involves various

Academic Departments of the UFRN, each of which

contributes with the different knowledge areas of the

project. This approach favours the multi-disciplinary

aspects of the Institute since, besides technological

aspects, social and human factors are also considered

within the project.

In the Educational axis, our mission is charac-

terised by initiatives that promotes the formation of

qualiﬁed IT professionals at various levels: from tech-

nical courses up to post-graduates. At the technical

level, our objective is to stimulate vocational IT skills

in teenagers aging from 15 to 18 years

, always keep-

ing the social and digital inclusion in context. As

such, 70% of our students of the technical course are

from public schools from all over the State. In the

higher education, the Digital Metropolis is also in-

novating by creating the BSc on Information Tech-

nology and the BSc on Software Engineering. The

former will start in 2013 and the later has started in

2011 and will be incorporated to our Institute as from

2013. Both courses will run in our future physical

installations and aim at forming differentiated profes-

sional that are capable of taking important roles in lo-

cal IT companies and endeavor in startups in the ever-

growing ICT market.

In the Research axis, the Digital Metropolis aims

at broading out the natural vocation of the UFRN

in scientiﬁc development and technological innova-

tion through a direct integration with private and pub-

lic companies driving the practical application of re-

search results and the technology transfer. Our objec-

tive in a near future is to establish partnerships that

promote the implantation of a technological center in

Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. On the other hand, this

interaction will also allow the University to become

aware of the real problems in society that demand

high skilled research.

Finally, in the Extension axis of the project, our

mission is to foster the entrepreneur vocation in the

young members of the project. In that sense, the Dig-

ital Metropolis support start-ups initiatives based on

innovative projects. By creating and supporting such

environment,we foster the inclusion of the students of

the project both from the technical courses and higher

education in real life projects.

The existing synergy of UFRN and society on the

three supporting axis of the project has been the key

of the project’s success so far. By qualifying students

and integrating them with local ICT companies as

well as stimulating them to open their own start-ups,

we make it a real possibility to transform the State’s

current economical and social proﬁle.

As described latter in this paper, in 2013, this will range

from 15 to 20 years old; furthermore, we will also offer the

course for students above 20 years old

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3 HISTORIC OVERVIEW

The Technical Courses of the Digital Metropolis In-

stitute started on March, 2009, with the ﬁrst group of

1195 students. This ﬁrst course had a duration of 15

months and its curricular structure was the basis of

our current structure described in Section 4. In June,

2011, the ﬁrst group of 407 students successfully ﬁn-

ished the course. The success rate was a good indica-

tive since our 34% success rate was well above the

national average rate of 18% (Soares, 2011).

Currently, we are running the second group of stu-

dents, which also started with 1200 students aging

from 15 to 18 years. However, in its current three-

semesters structure discussed in the next Section, the

course became a Technical Course with three pos-

sible specialities: Technician in Web Programming,

Technician in Computer Networks, and Technician in

Electronics.

In both occasions, the execution mode of the

course was online, but with weekly interventions of

tutors that follow the students throughout the course.

Nevertheless, as expected, our experience with the

ﬁrst group of students allowed us to apply changes

to the daily operational execution of the course that

resulted in the structure presented in the next section.

4 THE TECHNICAL COURSE OF

THE DIGITAL METROPOLIS

INSTITUTE

The technical courses of the Digital Metropolis Insti-

tute aim to attract young talents to the area of ICTs

as a means to promote the establishment of an excel-

lence center in this area. In this context, currently,

the Institute offers three specialities in the techni-

cal courses: web programming, computer networks,

and electronic. As we detail later in this section, all

courses are executed with online material and weekly

physical meetings. They have been prepared in a

process of appropriation and production of state-of-

the-art knowledge on ICTs and may contribute to the

preparation of high-skilled professionals throughout

Natal, helping the city to become an excellence cen-

ter on ICTs.

Our technical courses target local students be-

tween 15 e 18 years old, which ﬁt the proﬁle of ICTs

skills. In summary, during these courses the students

learn basic mathematicalnotions, which are necessary

for programming, general concepts on computational

systems like operating systems and computer archi-

tectures, and programming (for the web, computer

networks, or electronic circuits - depending on the

specialisation). Besides the technical knowledge, stu-

dents also learn to deal with technical material writ-

ten in English. Finally, at the end of the course, stu-

dents are motivated to undertake specialised courses

and to integrate with local companies as junior pro-

grammers. At the end of these courses, our students

are able to smoothly integrate into a working environ-

ment on ICTs broadening the horizonsof their profes-

sional careers.

4.1 Course Structure

The courses are organized in three modules: basic

module, advanced module and integration module.

Each of these modules have a duration of approxi-

mately six months with a 400 hours class load. The

ﬁrst module (basic) aims to introduce the students to

the area of ICTs and programming. Furthermore, it

also offers material on technical English. During the

six months of the basic module, the students take 9

subjects presented in Figure 1, which involve an Intro-

duction to Information Technologies, Technical En-

glish, Computer Systems, and Basic Programming.

Figure 1: Basic Module Structure.

Once ﬁnished with the basic module, the student

is allowed to ingress in thesecond phase of the course,

the advanced module, in which we aim to offer a more

speciﬁc knowledge to the students. Hence, when

subscribing to this module, the students are asked

to choose one of the three specialities of the techni-

cal course: web programming, computer networks, or

electronics. Overall, during the six months of the ad-

vanced module, the students have a 400 hours class

load that are divided into the subjects according to

its choice as presented in Figure 2. In this module,

the students of all specialities have an extended for-

mation in technical English. Furthermore, students

of web programming and computer networks study

further programming and databases. After that, web

programming students have a specialising training on

web programming, which includes programming for

mobile devices. The students of computer networks

specialize in network infra-structure and security. Fi-

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nally, the students of Electronics have subjects on

electronic circuits, micro-controllers, radio-frequency

systems, and integrated circuits prototyping.

The ﬁnal module of the technical courses aims at

providing an integration between academia and indus-

try. In this module, students are able to undertake

more specialised courses provided by local and na-

tional companies, which enable them to acquire more

speciﬁc knowledge required by these companies. The

courses also work as a link between the students and

the companies that offers them, which are able to re-

cruit the students with a more detailed analysis of the

candidates skills. In our Institute, students are in con-

stant contact with the Institute’s start-up incubator.

Hence, entrepreneurship is a further possibility of our

egress students.

4.2 Running the Courses

All our technical courses are distance semi-attending

courses. This modality allows both a concomitant ex-

ecution with their standard school courses and, more

importantly, a large scale offer of the courses. Cur-

rently, we offer 1200 vacancies. In 2013, this num-

ber will increase to 2400 vacancies with the plans de-

scribed in Section 6.

The students are divided into groups of 40 stu-

dents which happen synchronously. Each of these

classes are allocated to a tutor, whose job is to fol-

low the students throughout the whole module. Due

to this nature of tutoring, the tutors are required to

have a strong background on the module’s subjects.

In our experience, most of the tutors are students of

one of our post-graduate programmes.

The tutors interact with their students both on-

site and virtually. The on-site weekly meetings take

place in the university. Each group of students has a 4

hours meeting per week with a ﬁxed schedule. Over-

all, the meetings happen from monday to saturday in

the three periods of the day. This broad availability

of choices makes it possible for us to offer the course

to the most number of students. The tutors use these

4 hours meetings to present a resume of the week’s

subjects and to answer any questions that the students

have regarding the week’s subjects. At the end of the

meetings, students are asked to complete exercises on

the week’s subjects. Most of these exercises have a

practical nature as they require the students to prac-

tice the theorythey havelearnt online. For instance, in

the programming related disciplines, the students are

mostly asked to provide programs that solve certain

problems. The answers of these exercises are used to

compose the student’s ﬁnal mark as described in Sec-

tion 4.3. Furthermore, during the meetings the stu-

dents engage on discussions about non-technical sub-

jects on ICTs. These discussions foster their interest

in the area by providing a broader non-technical view

on the area.

During a module execution, the disciplines are ex-

ecuted sequentially. Every week, the students are in

touch with 2 or 3 subjects. For each of these subjects,

the students are given 1 to 3 lectures, each of which

correspondto a 4 hours class load. Hence, weekly, the

students are asked to study between 4 to 6 lectures (16

hours to 24 hours class load). Each of these lectures

are available to the students in our Moodle based on-

line learning environment. They have been elaborated

by Lecturers of our Institution, all of which are post-

graduated (PhD) in the subject of the material they

have been assigned for, as we describe in Section 4.5.

Besides the online lectures the students are also given

the opportunity to interact with their tutors in the vir-

tual classes that also happen in the online learning en-

vironment.

As a means to facilitate the access to both mate-

rial and online exercises, the Institute offers access

points to all students throughout the week. Further-

more, every student is given a media that contains

all the material of the current module in execution.

Hence, the student is given various opportunities to

access the courses helping them to keep in touch with

their classes execution.

4.3 Keep Tracking of the Student’s

Evolution

During the course, the students are continuously eval-

uated. This is enforced by the ﬁnal composition of the

module’s gradethat we explain in the sequel. For each

subject, the student is graded based on three compo-

nents: participation (25%), on-line exercises (25%),

and the ﬁnal exam (50%). The subject’s ﬁnal grade is

the weighted average of these three components.

The participation includes both virtual and on-site

activities of the student. For the virtual participa-

tion grade, we developed a tool that automatically

analyses the log of the virtual learning environment

and produces a weekly-based grade for each student.

Among the activities that are considered in this anal-

ysis we have number of logins, time dedicated on-

line, participation in forums, and exercises. For each

one of these components, students that are above the

component’s threshold are given the maximum grade.

Students that arebelowthe thresholdreceive the grade

proportionally. For instance, the time dedicated on-

line threshold is 16 hours per week. Students above

this time receive a mark 10 (ranging from 0 to 10); a

student that dedicated 8 hours would receive a mark

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Figure 2: Advanced Module Structure.

5 on the corresponding week. The ﬁnal grade of the

online participation is automatically calculated by the

tool; it is the weighted average of the components of

interest in the log. The on-site participation is graded

by the tutor and takes into consideration the partici-

pation of the students during the weekly meeting and

the students results in the list of exercises given at the

end of each on-site meeting.

The second component of the ﬁnal grade of each

subject correspondsto the student’s on-line exercises.

For each 4 hours lectures that is made available in the

virtual learning environment, the student is asked to

answer 5 exercises. Hence, overall, besides the ex-

ercises of the weekly on-site meetings, the students

have a load of exercises that range from 20 to 30 ex-

ercises. Most of the exercises have a practical nature

as they requirethe solution of practical problems. The

style of these questions range from multiple choice to

open questions. In case of multiple choice questions,

the correction of the exercises is done automatically

by the virtual environment. The remainder of the ex-

ercises is graded by the student’s tutors.

The last part of the subject’s grade is the subject

ﬁnal exam. This exam is applied twice per module,

each of which correspondsto a different group of sub-

jects of the module. Each 4 hours of class load of the

subject corresponds to one question of the ﬁnal exam.

For example, a 40 hours class load subject contains 10

questions in the ﬁnal exam. The nature of these ques-

tions is the same as that of the exercises presented to

the students during the weekly meetings and in the

online exercises.

Based on the three components discussed above,

the student receives a ﬁnal grade in each subject. The

students ﬁnal performance in the module, however,

is given as the weighted average of the grades of all

subjects of the module, where the weight of each dis-

cipline corresponds to its class load. The students

with a ﬁnal module average above 5.0 are approved

in the module and qualify to the next module. The

students that fail to achieve this mark are given a sec-

ond opportunity: they are allowed to take a second

ﬁnal exam. After this second exam, the ﬁnal grade of

the module is recalculate. The same requirements for

approval apply to this very ﬁnal mark. Students that

fail again to achieve the threshold of 5.0 after the very

ﬁnal exam are excluded from the program, but may

take part in the entrance examination again. As the in-

tegration module is composed only by activities, this

is valid only for the basic module and the advanced

module.

When the basic module is ﬁnished, the approved

students are given the choice of the emphasis of the

advanced module. Since some of the emphasis have a

limited number of places due to physical limitations,

we give the priority of choice to those students with

better ﬁnal grade in the basic module. Every student,

however, is allocated to some class in the advanced

module. In cases in which the student’s choice for the

advanced module is not available, he is allocated to

another emphasis. The grading of the advanced mod-

ule is very similar to that of the basic module.

During the modules execution, a thorough follow-

through of the students participation in the course is

made. This is achievedby a continuous analysis of the

student’s participation and exercises, which allows us

to identify students that have a performancebelow av-

erage. In such cases, we invite this students to per-

sonal meetings with the team of social assistance of

the Institute. Based on these meetings, we identify

the student’s needs and accommodate our resources

in order to solve the issues. In some few cases, this

also involved the Psychology team of the Institute.

4.4 Prospection of Talents

The evaluation tool used in the selection of candi-

dates willing to access the technical courses of our

Institute was composed by 30 multiple choice ques-

tions, each question having only one correct option

among ﬁve possible choices. This evaluation tool was

supposed to cover a set of abilities and competen-

cies considered critical for an IT formation and ca-

reer, and was based on a certain number of assump-

UsingITEducationtoRevealNewHorizons-ALargeScaleCaseStudyonDigitalandSocialInclusion

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tions related to this operational target of selection.

These abilities and competencies are seen as struc-

tural modalities of intelligence, necessary in prag-

matic, situated knowing, having variable degrees of

complexity. In other words, the instrument was not

focused in formal-conceptual, informational school-

like aspects of knowledge, covering instead strategies

of data analysis in the context of problem-solving pro-

cedures and differing from traditional school evalua-

tion instruments (Primi, 2003). So, the assessment

contemplated the expertise described in the National

Curricular Parameters (NCP) (Educacional, 2012) in

some of speciﬁc knowledge areas, particularly in

the domain of languages, coding and their technolo-

gies (2000), which is more promptly associated with

the identiﬁcation of talents and skill building in ICTs.

For example, the assessment was composed by

questions of exploration of the familiarity of the stu-

dents with the following skills:

• ”Understand and use the symbolic systems of dif-

ferent languages as a means for cognitive organi-

sation of the reality by the constitution of mean-

ings, expression, communication ann informa-

tion¨ (NCP, 2000, p. 6)”

• ”Analyse, interpret, and apply the expressive re-

sources of the languages, relating texts to their

contexts, by the aid of their nature, function, or-

ganisation of manifestation, in accordance with

the conditions of production and reception (NCP,

2000, p. 8)”

We understand this paradigm of assessment ap-

praises the high levels scholar skills, which are fun-

damental to a better performance in the technical

courses of our Institute. Additionally, this might pro-

vide an incentive for schools on our state to adopt the

NCP, enhancing the aggregated value of our proposal.

On the other hand, despite the need and importance

of deﬁning a paradigm for the assessment, the orien-

tation around the NCP was not enough for building

the intended selection mechanism, mainly because

the NCP do not deal directly with professional for-

mation, and even less when dealing with ICTs. The

assessment also needed to ensure that the selected

students had an indicator of talent in speciﬁc areas

such as computer programming, for example. The as-

sessment incorporatedan investigation of the students

skills and vocations relatedto ICTs, even in an emerg-

ing state, as a means for amplifying their success in

the courses of the institute and, consequently, attend-

ing our targets of providing the students with a high

degree of ICTs formation and capability of getting a

job after the courses.

The process of assembling the evaluation instru-

ment mentioned above was based ﬁrstly on the propo-

sition of a limited set of competencies and abilities

demanded by environments and situations related to

IT (stage 1); once these competencies and abilities

were established, stage 2 was characterised by the

decomposition of these competencies and abilities in

smaller units allowing the proposition of descriptors

over which speciﬁc items could be proposed(stage 3);

the set of items constituting the complete evaluation

tool was then applied to the groupof candidates (stage

4), allowing ﬁnally to the constitution of the selected

group of students entering in our courses (stage 5).

In this direction, we have elaborated an evalua-

tion instrument oriented by: (1) on the paradigm side,

the investigation of the skills every student should de-

velop in the areas of languages, coding and their tech-

nologies, and; (2) on the pragmatic side, the inves-

tigation of talents directly associated with the skills

and vocations of ICTs. Below, we list the set of tal-

ents, vocations and skills that deal with this pragmatic

aspect of the assessment, which were inspired by the

indicators of the International Society for Technology

in Education (ISTE)

1. Creativity and Innovation

(a) Apply knowledge in the construction of new

ideas, products and processes.

(b) Use models and simulations to explore systems

and complex situations.

2. Communication and Collaboration

(a) Communicate ideas through diversiﬁedways of

registering.

(b) Develop an appreciation and understanding of

different cultures.

times capable of solving problems and produc-

ing original works.

3. Research and Information Management

(a) Localise, organise, analyse, evaluate, synthe-

sise, and ethically use information from diver-

siﬁed sources and medias.

(b) Evaluate and select information sources and

digital artifacts appropriated for speciﬁc tasks.

4. Critical Thought, Problem Solving and Decision

Making.

(a) Identify and deﬁne authentic problems and sig-

niﬁcant questions for investigation.

(b) Collect and analyse data aiming at making de-

cisions in speciﬁc situations.

https://www.iste.org/

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608

spectives as a means for exploring alternative

solutions for non-canonical problems.

5. Concepts and Procedures in Technology

(a) Comprehend the use of information systems.

(b) Effectively and productively select applications

and platforms.

technologies.

This structure aimed at maximising chances of se-

lecting students who would stay longer and be more

successful in our courses, since they would already

have at least a few of the skills and a sense of the dig-

ital culture we wanted to develop. Furthermore, the

assessment questions blended content and contexts of

digital media, drawing very explicitly on students’

common-sensical knowledge of IT.

4.5 Digital Material

The didactic material of our courses have been elabo-

rated by a team of over 30 PhD lectures of the UFRN,

each of which was supported by an assistant (nor-

mally post-graduate students). Furthermore, the un-

processed material went through a thorough revision

process that included: grammatical revision, analysis

of the language use in accordance to distance learn-

ing standards, accordance with rules of the Brazilian

Association of Technical Rules (ABNT)

, and a dia-

grammatic edition that made the ﬁnal material more

accessible and attractive for the students. Overall, the

whole process of creation, revision, and edition of the

didactic material involved a group of over 60 people.

In total, our portfolio includes 320 lectures and

3200 exercises on all disciplines discussed in Sec-

tion 4, each of which correspondsto 4 hoursclass load

of one discipline. This material is available to all stu-

dents in the virtual learning environment. In Figure 3,

we present a sample of the material as presented to

the students.

4.6 Current Results

In 2010, the entrance examination had a number of

7000 candidates for an offer of 1200 vacancies in the

course (rate of 5.83). This number considered in-

creased in 2011, when we had a number of 13500 for

an offer of 1200 vacancies (rate of 11.25). This year,

as we will describe in Section 6, we considerably in-

creased the number of vacancies and geographically

distributed the course throughout the State. In 2012,

http://www.abnt.org.br/

the number of candidates stabilised in 13300 candi-

dates, but now we offer 2400 vacancies in the course,

bringing down the acceptance rate to around 5 (5.54).

So far, only students from 2010 have completed

the basic and advanced modules with an acceptance

rate of 34% (407 students), well above the national

average of 18%. Interestingly, the rate of students ac-

cording to the sector of their schools (either public

or private), which was 70-30 at the beginning of the

course (see Section 1), proved to stay almost constant

in the group of graduated students. In the end of the

course, this rate was of 67-33. This was a strong in-

dication of the success of the instrument used in the

prospection of talents.

Initially, the course was planned to be a basic for-

mation course. Nevertheless, during the execution of

the ﬁrst version of the course, we identiﬁed its poten-

tial to become a course that offered a technical de-

gree to its graduated students. The students of 2010

that completed both modules have been given the op-

portunity to re-ingress the course along with the stu-

dents of 2012. A total of 269 students (67% of the

graduated students) started the new version of the

course which offers the technical degree. From those,

140 (52%) are ﬁnishing the missing disciplines which

entitles them to start the integration module. From the

group of 1200 students that started the course in 2012,

517 (43%) students have concluded the basic module

and are currently in the advanced module.

The number of students that are currently trainees

in local companies is considerably high (over 50),

specially considering that they have not yet started the

advanced module. Their performance in these activi-

ties will be the object of study in the next months.

5 A STEP TOWARDS

GRADUATION

(AND POST-GRADUATION)

Besides providing our students with a technical

course that provides them with skills on ICTs, the

course presented here aims at attracting these stu-

dents to the area and open their horizons. Among the

options for their near future, throughout the course,

we stimulate both (non-excluding) innovation-based

entrepreneurship and graduation. For that, our in-

stitute provides both a start-up incubator and under-

graduation courses. Among these courses we high-

light the recently created 3 years long bachelor’s de-

gree on Information Technology (BIT), which enti-

tles the graduated students to automatically choose to

follow-up on a second graduation on either Computer

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Figure 3: Sample of the Online Didactic Material.

Science orSoftware Engineeringcourses. From 2014,

the BIT will receive the best students of our technical

courses, broadening the possibilities of our students.

Yet another initiative that we will start from 2013

is the ICTs Olympics Competition for students ag-

ing below 15 years. This competition will cover the

whole of our State and enable students to have a ﬁrst

contact with ICTs. From 2014, our technical courses

will provide free seats for the best students of this

competition.

Hence, by implementing these two initiatives

which are currently under development, we will con-

siderably broaden the public ofour Institute and, more

importantly, provide all students of our state with new

horizons, starting from the middle school, towards

graduation.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

OF THE COURSE

Despite the goodresults reachedso far, the roadahead

of us has still a considerable number of challenges.

We have already started dealing with some of them.

For example, in 2013, we will start to spread the

course (originally executed only with the capital of

our State, Natal) to the whole of the State. Next

year, three new cities will be offering the course in

the same modus operandi as the one offered in Natal.

They are Angicos (170 Km), Mossor´o (272 Km), and

Caic´o (277 Km), which cover the main economical

regions of our State.

The course’s expansion has not only be geograph-

ical, but also in numbers and age groups. First, from

2013, the Institute will offer 2400 vacancies spread

in the 4 cities in which the courses will be executed.

Although doubling the current number of vacancies,

we aim to keep this expansion in order to achieve our

target of 5000 students by 2015. Yet another expan-

sion is regarding the age group: from 2013 we ex-

panded the age of the core group of students which

will range from 15 to 20 years. Furthermore, students

aging above 20 years will also be offered 20% of the

vacancies.

A third dimension if the course’s expansion in

2013 is the list of possible emphasis in the advanced

module. In 2013,the course will also offerthe empha-

sis on Industrial Automation in the advanced module.

Furthermore, we are currently working on the cre-

ation of the emphasis on Digital Games that will be

included in the list of emphasis in 2014.

Another important challenge is regarding the

course’s digital material. Currently, due to the al-

ready difﬁcult challenges and innovation of making

the course as it is happen, the vast majority of the

digital material is not interactive. We are currently

running a thorough revision on the whole material

in order to include more interactivity to it. This re-

vision will expand the current material with screen-

casts, animations, and interactive exercises. Further-

more, a furtherrevision to the wholecourse is planned

by 2015. In this second revision we aim to provide

the possibility of a progress-as-you-learn courses like

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those provided by Coursera

We are also facing the challenge of consolidating

the integration module. Although we have already es-

tablished important partnership with local companies

and with international companies like IBM, we still

need to consolidate this module and systematise the

follow-up of the students. Currently, we are expand-

ing our contacts with local and national companies in

order either broaden the number of courses offered in

the integration module or to attract these companies

to the Institute. Furthermore, we are implementing a

system that will systematise the student’s follow-up in

order to provide important information that will help

the management of the large number of students in

this module.

We are strongly conﬁdent of the success of our

initiative. Mainly, the results reached so far have

strengthen this conﬁdence. In a near future, we ex-

pect these results will directly affect our State’s econ-

omy and completely change the current horizons of

our students by using ICTs and a means for that.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are extremely grateful to the whole team of the

Institute without which it would be impossible to

achieve the results. Mainly, the ofﬁce staff, the lec-

tures involved in the creation of the material and the

edition team, the tutors who have a more near contact

with the students, and the team that provides support

to the virtual environment. Furthermore, the ﬁnan-

cial support of the Ministry of Education and Min-

istry of Science, Technology and Innovation has been

a bedrock of our programm. We are also grateful to

Luciano Meira who has participated as a consultant in

the elaboration of the students evaluation instrument.

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