These courses are for professionals in the ICT field who want to enhance their knowledge of the field, and/or to fill in areas where their knowledge is currently deficient. Three subject matter areas covered by the Center - IT, telecommunications technology, and telecommunications industry. There is a need for two different types of educational courses:

  • GENERAL: broad subjects of interest to all professionals working in ICT;
  • SPECIFIC: specific topics of interest to professionals whose jobs deal with those particular subject areas.

The fact there are three areas of coverage - IT, telecommunications technology, and telecommunications industry - and two types of course suggest a matrix approach to the classification of education courses. Furthermore, because of the large numbers of courses potentially offered by the center, it is important to defined course modules, each consisting of a group of courses.

The diagram below depicts how these modules might be grouped depending on the career objectives of the student.

There are several advantages to grouping courses into modules in this fashion:

  • Modules identify sets of courses that are logically related in order to provide guidance to students as to the courses they might take;
  • Modules allow the Center to recognize student accomplishments by awarding certificates when a module is completed;
  • Stakeholders can identify modules that are of particular importance to them, which helps the Center to prioritize the development and delivery of courses; and
  • Stakeholders can identify new modules that are important for to them.
The diagram below shows the matrix of courses, and depicts how modules relate to the matrix. Different modules might consist of 1) courses falling entirely in either the general or specific part of one of the subject matter areas, such as the module in the upper left of the diagram; 2) courses from both the general and specific types of courses in one subject matter area, such as the vertical module on the right side of the diagram; or 3) courses that cut across two or more subject matter areas, potentially including general and specific courses in different subject matter areas, such as the diagonal module shown in the middle of the diagram.