Integrating Real Practical Experience in ICT Education

An important challenge for advancing the quality of education in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is to integrate education and practical experience. It is sensible to start such active learning already in an early stage of the curriculum, in a valuable, real-life, and effective manner. It is desirable to reach that goal in such a durable way that we can easily account for the continuous changes and extensions in the underlying ICT itself. This paper presents our experiences in integrating ICT education and practice from an educational designer’s point of view. We will give several hints on how to design such an integrated curriculum module. We first explicate which educational “design questions” deserve attention in designing such a module. For each such design question we present the solution we chose, some specific examples, our experiences over the years (gradually improving the organization of such a module), and alternative solutions there might be. We also give some quantitative information.