The iPro project aims to build a framework to help education institutions match their curriculum to the needs of media and arts businesses. The Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) is involved in the project to close the skills gap in digital media and art. IADT runs various degree programs in areas like audiovisual media technology. The iPro project involves nine partners from eight countries and will develop surveys to identify skills needs, create a competency framework, develop sample curriculum modules, and pilot the model with feedback from students and industry.

1. iPro
www.ipro-project.eu
The National Film School of Ireland at IADT
www.iadt.ie
Philip Penny: philip.penny@iadt.ie
Telecentre Europe 2014 “eSkills for the 21st century”
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-

2. iPro - IADT Synergy
iPro Aims & Objectives
• The aim of iPro project is to build, test and distribute a research based model
framework that will assist the Education sector especially VET’s & HEI’s to
match the curriculum of their students in (digital) Media and Arts Studies with
the professional requirements expressed by the (international) community of
media and arts businesses.
IADT’s Aims & Objectives
• IADT’s mission (to close the competence skills gap in digital media and art) is
very much along the same lines set out in the original iPro proposal. IADT has
a strong track record involving industry and domain experts across the creative
industries with a special focus on Film and TV production…
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

3. A little information on IADT
IADT is a not-for-profit Higher Education Institute, in Dublin,
Republic of Ireland
IADT’s Mission is to prepare Industry Ready Students for the
Creative Industry Enterprise
• In addition to running a broad range of courses surrounding Creative Technologies
for example Bachelor of Engineering in Audio Visual Media Technology BSc
(Hons) in Digital Media Systems BSc in Computing Multimedia Programming BSc
(Hons) in Computing in Multimedia Systems Web Engineering and BSc (Hons) in
Applied Psychology IADT hosts the new National Film School of Ireland…
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4. Institute of Art, Design & Technology
The National Film School of Ireland (NFS)
Telecentar Presi.mov
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5. iProfessional (iPro)
iPro is part funded under the European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme
It involves 9 Partners from 8 countries, these include:
P1 - Institute for postgraduate studies at UNWE – Bulgaria
P2 - Institute for training of personnel on international organization – Bulgaria
P3 - Audio-visual Technologies Informatics and telecommunications – Belgium
P4 - Telecentar – Croatia
P5 - IADT – Ireland
P6 - Asociatia Agentia de Monitorizare a Presei – Romania
P7 - Uniwersytet Łódzki – Poland
P8 - TIBER UMBRIA COMETT EDUCATION PROGRAMME – Italy
P9 - Vilnius Gediminas Technical University - Lithuania
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6. Rationale
The European Commission refers explicitly to the fact
that it is necessary “to enhance the performance of
education systems and to facilitate the entry of young
people to the labour market”…
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

7. Building a Research Based Model Framework
The aim of the project is to build, test and distribute a
research based model framework that will assist the
Education sector especially VET’s & HEI’s to match the
curriculum of their students in (digital) Media and Arts
Studies with the professional requirements expressed by
the (international) community of media and arts
businesses.
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

8. Project Objectives…
To reach this aim, the project has the following objectives:
• To define the domain and terminology
• To Design a shareable and localisable survey instrument to detect skills and competence
gaps in the professional digital media and arts sector
• To Define the instruments for curriculum design that are appropriate to the target sector,
taking into account local, regional, national and international (EU) requirements and
conditions
• To Design the draft curriculum design framework
• To Pilot this draft curriculum design framework with a limited number of HEIs and
businesses (where relevant)
• To prepare a exploitable version of the curriculum design framework, that can be
distributed, exploited and localised for use in HEIs in all European countries
• To make the target audience (HEIs with digital media and arts studies programmes) aware
of the possibilities the curriculum design framework offers them to fine-tune and
dynamically adapt their study curricula
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

9. Work Packages
To help provide an overview of the project which is still evolving I
have included on the next 5 slides an overview of the core
Worpackages for your perusal at a later date...
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

10. WP 3 - Media Professionals’ Skills and Competences Needs Analysis - The
objective is to lay the research basis for the framework that will be the
eventual output of the project. The idea is to design a survey instrument
that supports the design and development of the curriculum framework in
this project but that can be used afterwards by institutions and interested
groups to continuously measure the dynamics of professional requirements
and workers profiles in this particular professional area. In that sense it will
be designed to be an open resource that can be translated and adapted and
that will follow the trends and changes in the industry and education.
The aim is to have a survey sample of more than 200 surveyed in each region
or linguistic group. This will give the evaluation and validation of the survey
instrument a sound basis while at the same time, there will be a good mass of
evidence to support the baseline research into the skills and competences
gap.
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11. WP 4 - Media Professionals’ Competence Framework – This is to develop a
reference framework of competences required by developers of digital
multimedia content from within the perspective of (Higher and Further)
Education curriculum design. The competence framework will define a set of
knowledge, skills and attitudes for professionals within the new media sector,
needed to achieve measurable outputs according to the expectations of the
sector. This framework will include creative, technical and business
competencies that will be used by the project consortium as guidelines to
define learning outcomes and develop pilot training curriculum for digital
media professionals, to be tested and validated against the existing or within
newly developed curricula.
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

12. WP 5 - Model Training Curriculum and Sample Modules Elaboration - This WP
is to prepare the HEI’s for further selection and creation of educational
materials in the digital Arts and Media studies, that are addressing study topics
that are missing and to investigate what actions need to be taken to get
acceptance and uptake for these subjects that are potentially entirely new in
the curriculum. There is an aspect to this work which is similar to “train the
trainers” – to prepare to use the instruments created in WP4 to adapt and
complement educational materials (preferably under the form of multimedia
and arts based lecture notes, multimedia textbooks and online multimedia
courses) in order to reflect the specific nature of the requirements of the
Digital Media and Arts Professional.
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13. WP5 Continued… The work will also include research for multimedia
components and design thereof where not available, that address these
subjects that are required according to the research. Based on the selected
multimedia components, a curriculum will be developed and look at how to
implement these components. At the end of the WP, sample curricula will be
developed that can be elaborated by education modules, demonstrating the
capabilities of a new type of curricula of education materials for Media and
Arts Studies. The developed education modules will be evaluated, using
university students and university academic staff and teachers as well as
stakeholders from the industry and society.
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

14. WP 6 - Piloting of the model – The objectives are:
• To pilot train iProfessionals
• To evaluate the training structure
• In an iterative fashion make adjustments to the training platform after the
testing phase
The e-learning course will be piloted in English with 20 iProfessionals in every
country. At the end every tester will carry out a learning outcomes based test.
It will be possible for participants to be assessed in only some units of learning
outcomes. Every partner will appoint a tutor for the unit it has produced so to
interact, support and sustain motivation of participants. The pilot participants
will interact at a distance in English with other testers and with the tutor in
charge for the unit. After the training evaluation and the feedback collected
iProfesiionals quality standards will be developed.
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR

15. Summary
Two Invitations
1) to Share Results & Findings on iPro
and
2) IADT are open to invitations to collaborate on future EU
project bids appropriate to our Programmes
outlined in this presentation
Thank You for Your Attention!
www.ipro-project.eu iPro 540097-LLP-1-2013-1-BG-ERASMUS-EQR