AEROVET

The AEROVET project will run from 2009 - 2012, so please feel free to start new discussions or to add to the existing ones.

This discussion topic will focus upon issues concerned with AEROVET. AEROVET is a European comparative project funded under the Leonardo programme, which looks at how aircraft maintenance technician training is carried out in France, Germany, Spain and the UK and the scope for trainees to take some modules in another country and receive appropriate credit (and whether in future this could be facilitated under the auspices of ECVET).

These four countries were involved in a previous project which involved the development of holistic Typical Professional Tasks (TPTs) for use in initial training in Airbus. The idea was that mastery of the TPTs would give a basis of developing expertise (and be a more reliable indicator than achievement of learning outcomes, because of the level of aggregation of the tasks), but it is possible to move from TPTs to LOs in order to construct modules, assign credit etc. which could be part of the ECVET system.

This work is developmental and will feed into how the ECVET system evolves.  

TPTs have to be expressed in terms of skills, knowledge, understanding and competences which are already implied in the descriptions of the TPTs. The result will be that the TPTs are expressed in terms of (potentially Europe-wide) units – that is, the TPTs are turned into a form acceptable to accreditation bodies and potentially of use within ECVET.

Each national team compares the units with the national regulations (in order to see whether there are any possible additions to be made to the units or whether there are any divergences. Each national team will calculate the relative weight of (each unit) of the national qualification and then ascribe notional credit points. This process will allow a comparison to be made between the ratings given between countries and it could also be linked to progression to higher level qualifications. The intention will then be to develop some (European) core profiles / common units.

At the next stage the project will be concenred with the technical development of European sub-units etc. with the aim to allow progression to HE and the sub-units will be compared to the ECTS scheme (in a process of validation).
 
This should facilitate the interchange of apprentices across countries (whcih should be easier because of the common units) and there will be an evaluation of outcomes (some tests of apprentice decision-making), with an examination of solutions offered by apprentices in tests (of the extent to which they are able to engage in independent problem-solving) and judgements will then be made about the the application of the whole approach to ECVET.