In Portugal, the demand for technology professionals is higher than the existing supply, with a tendency to worsen. This program aims to retrain a wide range of unemployed professionals, who have the potential to develop a career in the technological area. The program involves a training process of 3-6 months, to be taught in an educational institution, with the aim of preparing people to start a new profession in technical areas. Trainers at polytechnic institutes face a challenge related to defining the training actions to consider and the corresponding training contents. To achieve the main objective of this program, the chapter intends to demonstrate that the application of PBL can contribute to and facilitate the accelerated development of skills in technological and innovation areas. The aim is to help the trainers define the courses and choose the best strategy to evaluate the students' learning process. It is the intention to include (1) description of “UPSkills “program and PLB, (2) describe how to apply the PBL, and (3) present a course design proposal.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, we have been seeing a high level of unemployment, as result of the political and economic situation as well as of the pandemic situation. This new reality requires the professional reskilling of individuals so that they can meet the specific hiring needs of companies. This reskilling is intended to convert people from other areas into ICT (Information and Communication technology) professionals, which will allow them to get better jobs and better wages.
In Portugal, the partnership between the Institute for Employment and Professional Training, Coordinating Council of Higher Polytechnic Institutes and the Portuguese Association for the Development of Communications, became more active in the past two years to help solve the problem of scarce qualified human resources for the companies of the ICT sector. This initiative is aimed at all unemployed or underemployed people, with at least complete secondary education, challenging them to be reskilled, through the training actions promoted by these institutions, thus accepting the challenge of working in the ICT area. This challenge is not only limited to these trainees since higher education professors who are responsible for these actions must adapt their learning strategies to train people according to their learning style and with limited know-how or even no knowledge at all in the ICT area in a short period of time.
It is in this context that this chapter arises, aiming to clarify the reader for the conceptual and design aspects of this type of course, with a brief description of its structure and how they can be applied in an educational context, helping to promote the acquisition/exploration of new knowledge and new ways of teaching. We intend to demonstrate that the new learning strategies that we have been applying in higher education, can be applied in courses whose target public have knowledge in different areas, such as music, nursing, engineering, education, and so on. Among successful learning strategies, we highlight the Problem-Based-Learning (PBL), which can be used to promote the acquisition of skills of professional upskilling and reskilling courses for the area of digital technologies.
Since PBL is considered an active teaching strategy that allows the student to take the lead and become responsible for his or her learning process (Egido Gálvez et al., 2019), the learning became collaborative and student-centered. This requires students to play an active role in re-discovering knowledge by applying the principles of constructivism based on their initial knowledge (Ramdany et al. 2022).
Based on these assumptions, the motivation for this study comes from the following research questions:
- •
“How to structure a training course that increases the motivation and performance of students?
- •
In which way can PBL facilitate the learning of contents in software development where trainees in a first phase receive ICT training and in a second phase acquire experience in a working context?”
As a response, to these questions, the chapter is structured in six sections: the section 2 presents a brief overview of “UPskill” Programme, the section 3 provides a theoretical background of our research, namely a brief overview of PBL; the section 4 describes as a course based in PBL can be designed; in section 5 present our model proposal and the respective goals, phases and techniques used. This model will be supported through practical examples applied to the Frontend course, namely to the database module. Finally, the chapter ends with a summary, a balanced assessment of the contribution of PBL and learning analytics when applied in course design which target public are students with academic qualifications in areas different of ICT.
TopUpskill Programme
The “UPskill - Digital Skills & Jobs” Program is the result of an agreement between the Associação Portuguesa para o Desenvolvimento das comunicações (APDC), the Instituto de Emprego e Formação Profissional (IEFP) and the Conselho Coordenador dos Institutos Superiores Politécnicos (CCISP) for professional requalification in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, with the main objective of requalifying 3000 professionals in the triennium 2020-2023.