European Online Master Degree Program for Addressing Labor Market Demands

Abstract

Demands and needs of labor markets have always been seldom concerned by providers of educational programs. Most of the educational curricula revolve around the theoretical concepts and their evolution without contemplating their purpose of deployments and application. This is common in most of the engineering curricula and the applied science. In this contribution, we present a new European project, Remote-labs Access in Internet-based Performance-Centered Learning Environment for Curriculum Support (RIPLECS) that aims to mitigate these issues by providing an official inter-institutional European master degree program in Information and Communication System (ICS). In order to globalize the master and to, at least, guarantee its accordance with the European education requirements, the program is conducted online across five European institutions and is oriented to labor market needs for qualified graduates, with special focus on realizing real-world experiments in each subject remotely, which tackle many geographical and time constrains. The network architecture of RIPLECS platform enables world-wide distribution of learning resources by utilizing multiple Web servers at several European universities, within a single network topology. The paper discusses the project development stages, implementation and the expected outcomes.