HEICA - Higher Education Initiative for Informatics in Central Asia
The project aims at the setup of a full educational program including an undergraduate Bachelor and a graduate Master degree. Due to the great amount of administratively imposed constraints on the undergraduate education, it was decided to assign the main responsibility of this part to the national partners in Central Asia themselves. The required work includes the restructuring of the fixed content to fit into a modularized Bachelor program, the modernization and completion of the IT content, the compilation of program documents and the official accreditation of the program by the national administrations. The involvement of external partners, in particular the EU partners, will focus on the IT-specific content ensuring a high quality of the updated course materials and a smooth interfacing to the continuing Master program.
In the Master program, on the other hand, the major emphasis will be the provision of new technical content. The broad spectrum of expertise among the EU partners enables the adoption of technically well-founded modules in a wide range of IT subdomains. Despites the greater freedom within the Master education, the Central Asian partners will still have to provide a module framework compatible to national regulations, which is officially approved accordingly.
While the academic consortium members gather significant expertise to undertake a fruitful internal quality assurance, additional external assistance is sought as well. This is of special importance as to avoid a situation with justified criticism that is withheld for the sake of the project climate. Such a development would have the potential to let devastating flaws pass until a final failure of the accreditation of the programs. Therefore, external experts are included within the project who are academically distinguished and capable of an additional thorough review. Mr. Atoev also provides firm practical experience with consulting and managing several large governmental and non-governmental IT projects in the Central Asian region.
Besides the administrative approvement of the programs, the seal of a European accreditation agency will be sought for one example institution. This step is considered essential to raise the acceptance of the established educational offer beyond the Central Asian region. It is further a conclusive third-party quality seal of the project results.
The project is founded by European Tempus Fundation.