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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAPQFTOOL

A Software Tool for National Qualifications Frameworks

Philippos Pouyioutas

, Harald Gjermundrod and Ioanna Dionysiou

Department of Computer Science, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

Keywords: European Qualifications Framework, National Qualifications Frameworks and Software Tools.

Abstract: This paper presents the preliminary stages of the design of MapQFTool, a software tool that will provide

support to the understanding and comparability of the National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) of the

various European countries. The paper starts by providing background information on the Bologna Process

and the Qualifications Frameworks. It then addresses the limitations of trying to map the various NQFs

against the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), and through the EQF against each other. It then

proceeds with explaining the advantages of automating this process with a software tool and provides

examples of information that can be generated through the proposed tool. A relational database design that

will underpin the development of the tool is described, accompanied with screenshots of the system

prototype and its architecture.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Bologna process (European Commission

Education and Learning, 2008) aims at developing a

European Educational Framework of standards,

definitions and concepts so as to provide the basis

for European countries to transform their

educational system according to this framework.

This will result in comparability/compatibility of the

various European educational systems which will

then yield collaborations amongst educational

institutions, exchanges of students and teachers

within Europe and transparency and transferability

of qualifications, all being very important when

looked from the point of view of students, Erasmus

co-ordinators, prospective employers, Quality

Assurance Agencies (QAAs), European Network of

Information Centres (ENIC), and National

Academic Recognition Information Centres

(NARIC).

One of the first and most important concepts

developed by the Bologna process is the European

Credit Transfer System (ECTS 2009) that provides

the framework for measuring the student workload

in courses/modules/programmes and thus calculating

the credits of these courses/modules/programmes.

Another important concept recently introduced is

the concept of the Learning Outcomes (LOs)

(Kennedy et al., 2006), which allows

courses/programmes to be expressed in terms of

what a learner/student is expected to be able to do by

the end of the course/programme. Employers will

thus be able to identify what students are able (or at

least should be able) of doing after completing their

programmes/courses. Furthermore, by studying

descriptions of studies expressed in terms of LOs

and thus comparing with what they expect graduates

to be able to do, employers could provide input for

the re-engineering of programmes taking into

consideration industry requirements. When it comes

to Erasmus co-ordinators, LOs assist in the

comparison of programmes and courses since they

provide a common framework/platform for

expressing the programmes/courses aims and

objectives looked at from the student point of view.

Last but not least, ENIC/NARIC networks are also

provided with a common framework/platform for

evaluating levels and degree qualifications.

The European Qualifications Framework (EQF

2010, EQF Newsletter1 2010) provides the basis for

mapping the National Qualifications Framework

(NQF) of each European country against this

framework, thus transitively, mapping each

country’s educational system against another

country’s system. EQF and NQFs describe in terms

of Learning Outcomes (knowledge, skills,

competences) the various levels of education starting

273

Pouyioutas P., Gjermundrod H. and Dionysiou I..

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAPQFTOOL - A Software Tool for National Qualiﬁcations Frameworks.

DOI: 10.5220/0003306602730279

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 273-279

ISBN: 978-989-8425-50-8

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Figure 1: Mapping NQFs to EQF. (adopted from EQF Newsletter April 2010 eac-eqf-newsletter@ec.europa.eu)

from the pre-primary level and reaching the

doctorate level. EQF caters for eight such levels,

whereas NQFs may cater for a different number of

levels. Many European countries may opt to adopt

the eight levels of EQF into their NQF, thus

providing a one-to-one relationship with EQF levels.

Irrespectively of whether eight or more or less levels

are adopted in a NQF, a mapping should be provided

from the NQF to EQF so one can understand at

which European level a national qualification level

(and thus an award of that level) corresponds to. The

mappings of all NQFs to EQF will thus allow

transitively a mapping from one NQF against

another and thus an understanding of different

educational systems of countries and equivalence of

levels and awards/degrees across Europe (Figure 1).

This is extremely important for students, academic

institutions, employers and National Quality

Assurance Agencies.

Three European countries so far have published

their NQFs reports: Ireland (Ireland 2009) and Malta

(Malta 2009) already in 2009, and the United

Kingdom (UK 2010a,b) earlier this year. It is

expected that seven additional countries will be able

to finalise their referencing in 2010, while most of

the others will need 2011 to achieve this process.

Still, all countries are expected to indicate the

appropriate EQF level in each new qualification they

issue by 2012 - which is the second target date

suggested by the EQF Recommendation.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

Section 2 explains the need for MapQFTool. Section

3 provides a relational database design to support the

development of the proposed tool and exemplifies its

functionality through screenshots of the prototype

version of the tool that is being developed. It also

provides examples of information that can be

generated by the tool for the various stakeholders,

namely the European Commission, the National

Quality Assurance Agencies, the educational

institutions, etc. Section 3 completes by discussing

the tool’s architecture. Finally, Conclusions presents

our future work.

2 THE NEED FOR MAPQFTOOL

The proposed tool will be very useful in presenting

information to the various stakeholders. More

specifically, the European Commission Agency

responsible for EQF, Educational Institutions and

National Quality Assurance Agencies in all

European countries will be maintaining the database

that will support the tool. Information regarding

programmes of studies/awards offered by the

institutions/countries, the NQF levels of each

European country, the mapping of each award to the

appropriate NQF level and the mapping of each

NQF level to the appropriate EQF level will be

maintained. This data will then be used to produce

various useful information for all the

aforementioned stakeholders, as well as to ministries

of education, students, parents, employers and the

general public. More specific details as to who is

responsible for what part of the database data is

given in Section 3 of this paper.

Although the setting up of all NQFs in Europe

and the mapping of the awards against the NQFs

levels and of the NQFs levels against the EQF levels

has not been completed, it is expected that a manual

process for producing information will be laborious,

slow and prone to errors. On the contrary, the use of

the proposed tool will provide fast error-free

information, as a result of either predefined or ad-

hoc reports/queries.

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274

Figure 2: The ER Model of the Proposed Database.

More specifically the tool will be providing

information such as:

1 Given an award, what is its NQF level

2 Given an award, what is its EQF level

3 Given an award in country A, what is its

NQF level in country B

4 Given an award in country A, what are the

equivalent NQF levels in all other countries

5 Given an award in country A what is its

equivalent award(s) in country B

6 Given an NQF level in country A what is its

equivalent EQF level

7 Given an NQF level in country A, what is its

equivalent level in country B

8 Given an NQF level in country A, what are

the equivalent NQF levels in all other

countries

9 Given an EQF level what are/is the

equivalent level(s) in the NQF of country A

10 Given an EQF level what are/is the awards

of that level in country A

11 Given an EQF level what are/is the awards

of that level in all countries

All the above queries are just samples of

predefined questions that can be written in the

database’s query language/report writer and produce

answers on the spot; they do not present the

exhaustive list of information that can be produced

by the system, but only samples that exemplify the

functionality and use of the proposed tool.

3 THE RELATIONAL DATABASE

DESIGN AND THE TOOL’S

ARCHITECTURE

In this section we provide a relational database

design that accommodates the system functionality

as explained in the previous section. Figure 2

illustrates the ER model that describes the database

entities, relationships and relational tables (including

primary and foreign keys).

MapQFTool will be a web-based application,

accessed over the Internet by the various

stakeholders. Figure 6 depicts graphically the

various users of the tool and its architecture. We

next explain the users of the tool and the way it will

function in terms of write/read access and

authorization privileges and then elaborate on

technical issues with regards to its system

architecture. Screenshots of the prototype of the tool

are also given to exemplify the way the tool will

work.

3.1 Users of MapQFTool

The tool will provide web access to authorised users

as shown in Figure 3. Public access through the

“Other” option (Figure 3) does not need user name

and password and is for the general public, whereas

the other types of users will need to login to the

system.

Each educational institution in each country will

have write access to the MapEQFTool’s database

with regards to its own data and the programmes of

study/awards that it offers (table Institution and part

of the table Awards – Aid, Aname of Figure 2). For

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275

Figure 3: The Tool’s log-in Screen.

example, an institution with Itype = ”University”,

can add a new award with Aname “BSc Computer

Science”. The AwardType field will be completed

by the National QAA since this will signify the

award’s recognition status and only the National

QAA will be allowed to do that. In this case the type

could be “Bachelor’s Degree, 1

Cycle”. An empty

filed signifies no recognition. Other types of

University awards are “Master Degree, 2

Cycle”,

“Doctorate Degree, 3

Cycle”. For Secondary

Education institutions an award Atype can be

“Apolyterium, Leaving Certificate”. The

responsibility of the mapping of each institutions

award to the NQF level will lie with the country’s

national Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Each

National QAA will thus be responsible/authorized

for updating the country’s NQF data (NQF table) the

awards types data (AwardType table) and

setting/maintaining the mapping from the country’s

institutions awards and (Lnumber, LNid) to the

NQF level. The European Commission Agency

responsible for EQF will be responsible/authorized

for maintaining the National QAA data and the EQF

levels and in collaboration with each country’s

National QAA, setting/maintaining the mapping

from each NQF level to an EQF level. Figure 4

illustrates the creation of a NQF level by the

appropriate National QAA. The knowledge, skills

and competences are recorded but the mapping to

the EQF level is restricted only to the European

Commission Agency which will be in charge for the

mappings.

When it comes to read access users, students,

parents, employers, ministries of education and

labour, teachers and the general public will have

access to the tool and be able to obtain information

similar to the one discussed in Section 2. An

example of a query and the way the tool supports

such queries is given in Figure 5.

3.2 Technical Considerations of the

Tool’s Architecture

A 3-tier web application architecture will be used for

the tool (see Figure 6). The information and

request/reply flow between the three tiers are as

follows: The user enters the web site using a Internet

browser. The front-end web-service receives a

request from the client browser, and this is

forwarded to the web service, which queries the

database and generates a webpage with the requested

information that is then sent back to the user’s

browser. One of the benefits of this architecture is

the clear separation between the presentation layer,

application logic layer, and the data access layer. As

the tool will be a web service, the users could access

it from anywhere as long as they have access to an

Internet browser. This simplifies the tool usage for

the average users, as there will be no need to install

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Figure 4: Create an NQF Level.

Figure 5: A sample of a Query.

any software on their personal computer.

The first two tiers will be developed using

Microsoft’s .NET platform. This platform provides

for rapid development and reuse of the .NET

components like WYSIWYG (What You See Is

What You Get) GUI building (web-forms), database

connectors, and ASP.NET controls. The third tier

will be developed using the MySQL database

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277

Figure 6: The Proposed MapEQFTool System Architecture.

service. The choice of using MYSQL as the back-

end database system is due to the fact that it is an

open-source service that supports a wide variety of

platforms with respect to both programming

languages and operating systems. Details on each of

the 3 tiers of the architecture are briefly given

below.

Presentation Layer: The presentation layer

provides the interface to the end-user of the tool.

Depending on the role of the user the tool will

render a customized webpage. From there, the user

could access the data, customize queries on the data,

and depending on the privileges of the assigned role

update the date. The users will not directly specify

the database queries, but instead they will choose

from options and set parameters that will

automatically generate the specific queries. Hence,

the technical knowledge that is required by the users

is keep at a minimum.

The presentation layer will be developed using

web forms from the .NET platform. The web forms

allow for rapid development of web pages by

reusing ASP components (explained later). The

forms will be “connected” with the application logic

that is handled by the second tier.

Application Logic Layer: The application layer

performs the requested requests/actions from the

users and returns the result back to the user. It

consists of two components, namely the front-end

web-service and the ASP component.

For the front-end web-service, Microsoft’s

Internet Information Services (IIS) will be used. The

service will concurrently accept requests from

multiple end-users and forward these to the ASP

components. Once the result is returned from the

ASP component, the IIS service will forward the

resulting web page to the appropriate end user.

The ASP (Active Server Pages) components are

responsible for performing the application logic of

the clients’ requests; some of them are “connected”

with a GUI element within the web page. The result

of the request is a webpage (HTML) that is send

back to the user. The C# programming language will

be used for the application logic and the query

options will be built using the LINQ (Brooks, 2008)

component. The application logic is as explained

above connected with the GUI elements. If the

application logic needs data in order to generate a

new web site, then it will make a request to the third

tier to provide the required data.

Data Access Layer: The data access layer provides

access to the back-end database that stores all the

data. The database will receive its queries from the

ASP as SQL queries and return the resulting data,

which is used to generate dynamic web pages that

are forwarded to the user.

The tool will use the MySQL database for its

back-end storage. MySQL is an open source

relational database management systems (RDBMS).

The interaction with MySQL is performed using the

SQL language. Connectors are provided to interact

with MySQL programmatically using various

programming languages and platforms. For the

MapEQFTool we will use the connector for the

.NET platform.

Future Consideration: First, the currently proposed

architecture will consist of only one database

service, but a distributed solution could be provided

if scalability should be an issue.

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Second, the top 2 tiers are developed using a

proprietary framework provided by Microsoft for the

Windows platform. There exists an open source

project, Mono (Avery and Holmes, 2006) that

provides implementation for the .Net framework on

other platforms. An evaluation could be done if the

top 2 tiers could be developed using an open source

solution.

4 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has presented the MapQFTool to allow

the various National Qualification Frameworks

(NQFs) to be mapped against the European

Qualification Framework and thus against each

other. The need for the tool was discussed and

justified by addressing the various limitations of

carrying out manually this process and trying to

compare and evaluate different qualifications and

awards from different countries. In order to develop

the tool, we provided a relational database design,

presented some screenshots of the tool’s prototype

and discussed a system architecture, elaborating on

the platforms chosen for its deployment.

We are currently in the process of building the

database based on the proposed design and then

proceeding with the full development of the tool. We

expect that the tool will be a very useful asset to all

stakeholders, namely the European Commission, the

National Quality Assurance Agencies, the

educational institutions and the general public.

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UNILO Project www.unilo.eu

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