Abstract: In the paper, the authors present their experience and results related to the design and management of the on-line course“Development of e-learning resources based on the EUCIP (The European Certification of Informatics Professionals) certification scheme”, which was organized under the auspices of the international Leonardo da Vinci project Sloop2desc (Sharing learning objects in an open perspective for development of European skills and competences). The course was primarily aimed at teachers of informatics. Out of 64 participants that applied for the course, slightly less than 50% managed to reach the last course module. In line with other research, the authors’ experience showed that in order to minimize participants’ drop-out rate, a sustained communication flow between tutors and participants was necessary and specific assignments had to be provided by the tutors, along with guidance. The authors expect the participants who successfully finished the on-line course to become a some kind of ambassadors for the introduction of the EUCIP scheme in Slovenia.
　　Key words: EUCIP (the European certification of informatics professionals), competences, online course in Slovenia.
　　1. Rationale—EUCIP in Slovenia
　　The European Certification of Informatics Professionals (EUCIP) is a professional certification and competency development scheme, aimed at informatics professionals and practitioners. It consists of a core certification as well as specialized certifications for a range of competences which are set out in an array of job-specific profiles. In addition, there is a standalone certification for Information Technology (IT) Administrator (cf. http://www.cepis.org/eucip, accessed: December 2, 2011).
　　The need for trained and experienced informatics professionals in Slovenia is considerable, but due to various reasons (e.g., low interest of students for the study of demanding disciplines), the national education system does not deliver enough qualified professionals. The result of this disproportion is that there are many self-declared professionals who cannot produce any kind of certificate to prove their alleged experience in information technology. There are, however, various industry and company certification schemes and certificates available, but mostly in large multinational companies. There are several disadvantages of such schemes, but a major weakness of industry certificates is that in most cases they are not supported by any national or international standard and, consequently are not commonly and publicly recognized as generally valid certificates.
　　The Slovenian Society Informatika (SSI) has seen EUCIP as providing a possibility to introduce a recognized training and certification program for those who work in information technology but have no formal qualification. Moreover, as SSI has successfully introduced European Computer Driving License (ECDL), it was confident that EUCIP—although much more demanding in this respect than ECDL, could be established in Slovenia as a scheme desirable both by those with no formal qualification and by employers alike. The first attempt in this direction was made in 2005, when SSI, two faculties and some commercial companies agreed that they would collaborate in a project which would lead to the availability of EUCIP training and certification. Also a study has been carried out which has shown that the project was viable, but for various reasons it did not take off at that time. However, the idea has not been forgotten and the Sloop2desc project has been perceived as a welcome opportunity to revisit the idea and to develop it further. Therefore, the decision was made to introduce the EUCIP certification scheme to Slovenian teachers of informatics through an online course “developing e-learning teaching and learning resources based on the EUCIP standard”, adapted from an Italian pilot course.
　　The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents theoretical background. Section 3 introduces course adaptations. Section 4 gives participant drop-out rates. Section 5 presents the quality of course activities. Sections 6 and 7 present results of self-evaluation and course evaluation. Section 8 gives final results. Section 9 presents lessons learned by the tutors. Section 10 presents conclusions.
　　2. Theoretical Background
　　Innovations in e-learning technologies point toward a revolution in education, allowing learning to be individualized (adaptive learning), enhancing learners’interactions with other students (collaborative learning), and transforming the role of the teacher [1]. This claim was supported by reviewing the growth of scientific literature in the field of e-learning on Web of Science, since a great increase in the number of publications was detected in the recent years (from 2005 to 2011).
　　Ranking the records published in the last years(2005-2011) by subject area further reveals that e-learning approaches are well established in a series of disciplines: education (33.6 % of records), computer science (28.8 % of records), engineering (8.8 % of records), health care (6.0 % of records ), information science & library science (3.4 % of records), and operation and management science (3.2 % of records).
　　These results are also supported by findings [2], that over the last decade the needs for e-learning and in particular Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning(CSCL) have been evolving accordingly, with more and more demanding pedagogical and technological requirements which should enable adaptations, adjustments, and personalization of the systems for specific target learning groups. A comprehensive review of the existing e-learning systems [3] reveals four general categories of e-learning technological systems:
　　Learning Management Systems(LMS)—supporting administrative tasks such as registration, scheduling, and learner tracking;
　　Managed Learning Environment(MLE)—including the whole range of information systems and processes that contribute directly or indirectly to learning and learning management;
　　Learning Content Management Systems(LCMS)—allowing developers to store, manage and provide access to pieces of content used in e-learning;
　　Virtual Learning Environments (VLE)—the components in which learners and tutors participate in several online interactions, including online learning[3].
　　E-learning technological systems differ in the level and quality of interactions and orientations between students and tutors (teachers) during the learning process from low level (LMS) to high level online interactions for VLE. The research work [4] has indicated that the lack of orientation and interactions as well as formative assessment leads to higher dropout rates, since from the perspective of students these elements of the system generate criticism and suggestions that guide them toward ultimate learning goals and improve their sustaining rates. The authors have suggested blending the web-based learning platform with external and human-involved interactions and assessment.
　　From the educators’ perspective, the most important aspect of e-learning is its impact on academic achievements, competencies and attitudes. A content analysis of studies in the field of cognition in e-learning that were published in five Social Sciences Citation Index journals from 2001 to 2005 [5], revealed 444 studies as being related to the specified field. Instructional approaches, learning environment and metacognition were recognized as the most popular research orientations, but the analysis of the citation counts suggested that the studies related to instructional approaches, information processing and motivation might have a greater impact on subsequent research.
　　Research findings reveal several issues of e-learning that have important impact on the effectiveness of learning and academic achievements. Thus, individual understanding of the nature of knowledge and the processes of knowledge creation in specific disciplines, proved to have a more significant impact on the quality of knowledge increase than did the amount of professional e-learning [6]. The incorporation into the e-learning systems interactive learner control tools for knowledge self-evaluation and metacognitive self-questioning method contributes to the reinforcement of students’ knowledge [7-9]. Blended learning modes enabling the combination of e-learning with interactive face-to-face sessions and evidence-based practice elements enriched with e-learning facilitator, to encourage students not only to be active in seeking knowledge, but to also engage in giving and sharing opinions among their peers outside the classroom, contribute to a better learning outcomes and retention rates [10-14]. But the biggest challenge not only of e-learning but learning in general is getting students to take responsibility of their own learning process [15]. Due to the rapidly growing applications of e-learning and web-based courses in education, there is a need to analyse the issue of reciprocal understanding in web-based learning in order to develop more profound pedagogical models [16]. The results of their research show that during the web-based course there was a reciprocal discussion between the participants. The participants had mutual negotiations and they discussed issues from a variety of different viewpoints. Seven different ideas were found for the mechanisms of reciprocal understanding. They concluded that this information is useful for developing a new pedagogical model for web-based learning and enhancing the quality of virtual interaction.
　　3. The Slovene Online Course Adaptations
　　Based on the research findings and their recommendations, we adapted the original Italian pilot course “developing e-learning teaching and learning resources based on the EUCIP standard” in order to obtain a good sustaining rate and motivation of participants throughout the course duration. The goals and the framework of the course remained as originally planned and the course timeline was not substantially changed. The course remained structured in five modules: Module 1—Using Moodle as a trainee and as a teacher; Module 2—Being an online tutor and using Web 2.0 tools; Module 3—Designing and sharing learning objects in an open perspective; Module 4—European Qualification Framework (EQF), e-Competence Framework (e-CF) and the EUCIP standard; Module 5—Collaborative development of educational resources based on the EUCIP standard. The first module was dedicated to the introduction of the Moodle learning management system from the viewpoint of students and teachers. Instead of videos, demonstrations made with Wink software were used for content presentation. In addition to assignments requiring forum participation, we introduced a series of specific tasks. Participants had to prepare a lesson, a quiz and optionally a book and questionnaire in Moodle in order to gain a wider notion of the learning environment’s capabilities. For maintaining participants’ interest it was extremely important that their assignments were regularly evaluated by tutors and the feedback on improvements was given to them through e-mail contacts or discussion forums. The majority of students took tutors’ recommendations seriously and they improved their products. The second module, “being an online tutor and using Web 2.0 tools”, introduced the role of tutor in the e-learning environment to the participants and presented a series of Web 2.0 tools particularly useful in computer-supported collaborative learning. Students were assigned some individual tasks, but the most important were the collaborative assignments for which they were divided into six groups of 10-11. Each group had to prepare a presentation of a selected Web 2.0 tool, using Google Docs. In another task they had to design a list of Web 2.0 tools with a short presentation of each tool, using a pre-prepared Wiki. The main addition to the third module, “designing and sharing learning object in an open perspective”, was an assignment to prepare an interactive learning resource in SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) format and publish it in the trial area of the course. For this task they were given detailed guidelines including the topic selection and didactical approach in designing learning materials. A model SCORM resource, prepared by a third year student of chemistry and biology, was added to the module. The tutors also added a Moodle quiz on Creative Commons licenses for participants’ knowledge assessment. Participants’work needed to be permanently monitored and stimulated in order to sustain motivation for completing assignments. Module 4 was adapted as well. Since we expected students to experience difficulties in correlating the module content to their daily school practice, two Moodle quizzes were added to assess their knowledge, first on the European Qualification Framework (EQF) and its relation to the e-Competence Framework and the second on the EUCIP certification system. Monitoring of students’ activities revealed that some students started entering the quizzes before having carefully studied the available learning resources. However on their second or third try they managed to improve their knowledge and achieve higher scores. The most important participants’ task of this module was to select three favourite topics and/or modules from the EUCIP Core and IT Administrator syllabi and rank their selection by preference. These preferences were used for dividing participants into groups for their final task—Collaborative design of an online course in Module 5. The following groups were set up: A7—Legal and Ethical Issues (six participants); B2—Data Management and Databases (six participants); B4—User Interface and Web Design(seven participants); M1—Personal Computer (PC) Hardware (six participants); M2—Operating systems(six participants).
　　4. Participants and Drop-Out Rate
　　The recruitment of teachers for the online course was not an easy task. Unresponsiveness/indifference to our invitations was observed especially among the authorities in charge of technical and vocational schools for computer and informatics technicians, as well as faculties producing secondary school informatics teachers. Several e-mails with kind invitations and appeals for cooperation remained unanswered. From this unpleasant experience we learned that only the school headmasters had the power to delegate teachers to in-service training. Once again personal contact proved to be a guarantee of success. With the support of the Institute of Education we managed through personal contact, to address the school headmasters directly, where after we eventually started to receive teachers’ applications for the online course. The final number of applicants for the EUCIP online course (64) and their structure of employment are presented in Fig. 1. The majority of course applicants were secondary school teachers of informatics.
　　Out of 64 applicants three never enrolled on the course; the majority of entrants dropped out from the course after the first (30%) or the second (20%) course module, but approximately 50 % of those who originally entered remained in the course and entered the final Module 5 of the course. It needs to be noted that some of those completed most, but not all of the required assignments in Modules 2-4. The moderate drop-out rate can be attributed to tutors’ support and high motivation of the participants, as found before Ref. [4]. When confronted with a demanding task to prepare learning materials for their own online course, only the most motivated ones persisted and finished the course, therefore the final drop-out rate was 68% indicating that only 20 participants out of 64 fulfilled all the requirements of the Slovenian EUCIP pilot online course.
　　


　　Fig. 1 Participants of the online course by place of employment.
　　5. Quality of Participants’ Activities
　　5.1 Module 1—Using Moodle as a Student and as a Teacher
　　Out of 61 participants who actually entered in the first module of the course, 51 were able to add resources and 52 to create a forum in the module trial space. More demanding tasks—preparing a lesson and quiz in Moodle were successfully completed by 46 participants and 41 respectively, while optional tasks—preparing a questionnaire and book in Moodle were accomplished by 13 and 15 participants, respectively. These numbers could be misleading unless the quality of participants’ lessons and quizzes are taken into account. In this respect we were unpleasantly surprised. The online course was not meant to address didactical aspects of lessons and quizzes, as the majority of participants were teachers. We assumed that they would be knowledgeable in the didactics of the subjects they are teaching. However, the lessons they produced were poor representations of their efforts, most often presented even without titles, goals, and defined topics. In most cases participants only created three or four pages of the lesson’s framework without any real content. In the case of quizzes they did not use all possible options for preparing test items; they chose just the easiest one—true/false. Instead of 10 test items as recommended, the majority prepared only 2 up to 5 test items, preferably of the same type. Only 10 participants joined a discussion forum on the usefulness of quizzes in Moodle. Out of 17 participants in the discussion on the usefulness of Moodle lessons, 15 were introduced to this tool for the first time, whereas all claimed that they would use lessons in Moodle more often.
　　5.2 Module 2—Being an Online Tutor and Using Web 2.0 Tools
　　First, the participants were asked to express their view on the role of an online tutor, which was done on the forum by 32 participants. In the next task, 38 participants described their current use of Web 2.0 tools. From the discussion forum on the use of Web 2.0 tools, we could conclude that they were familiar with most of the Web 2.0 tools and that they are using them regularly in their everyday life. Also the discussion on the role of tutors in e-learning was very vivid. The prevailing opinion was, however, that it is difficult to draw a line between a tutor and a teacher since their roles are often interwoven. Further tasks included adding entries on Web 2.0 tools in Delicious (completed by 30 participants), publishing a document in Google Docs(32) and adding entries on Web 2.0 tools to a Moodle Wiki (30). Some of the tasks mentioned were completed with some delay. In the main collaborative task, all participants starting the course were divided into groups (alphabetically) of 10-11 which had to prepare learning materials on selected Web 2.0 tools using Google Docs. The level of collaboration within groups varied greatly, from 2 to 8 active members. This task was successfully completed by 30 participants, in some cases with delay. As expected from previous findings [15], participants of the online course were poorly prepared to assume responsibility for their own learning especially when they were confronted with collaborative tasks. Some of them declared that they were not used to collaboration and one even expressed that she didn’t want to work in a group. As a result some either dropped out of the course or skipped the tasks. Tutors were faced with a reaction which one would not expect from teachers. Since the introduction of new school curricula in 2008 and 2010 all teachers are being encouraged to use active teaching and learning strategies enriched by interdisciplinary approaches in their classes. This new paradigm could be realized only in close cooperation with teachers of different disciplines and even different schools.
　　5.3 Module 3—Designing and Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective
　　All participants’ assignments in this module were individual; 32 solved the quiz (mean score 8.89 out of 10), 29 prepared their own PowerPoint presentation and uploaded it in the Slide Share, 27 produced and uploaded their own movie in You Tube, but the most demanding task—preparing and uploading in the trial space a SCORM of e-unit, was completed on time by only 19 participants. In the middle of Module 4, four more participants managed to upload their SCORMs; and thanks to the detailed guideline referring to the structure and content of the e-unit and critical analyses of their lessons and quizzes prepared in the first module, the quality of their products increased substantially. Therefore we gained confirmation of the importance of tutors’ intervention and permanent participants’guidance throughout the e-course in order to achieve the sustainability and quality of learning outcomes. The participation in the discussion forums also improved as compared to that for Module 1. Altogether, 30 participants joined the discussion on Creative Commons licenses and their applications. The majority would assign a licence to their resources: approval of the authorship, non-commercial and share alike, and 32 of them participated in the discussion on usefulness of sharing open learning objects for promotion of e-learning. They mostly agreed that the idea of open learning resources of a high quality would be welcome promotional material for broadening the use of e-learning in our schools.
　　5.4 Module 4—European Qualification Framework(EQF), e-Competence Framework (e-CF) and EUCIP Certificate
　　The quiz on the European Qualification Framework and e-competences was solved by 24 participants(mean score 9.56 out of 10) while the quiz on the EUCIP certificate was solved by 20 participants (mean score 8.5/10). 25 participants supported the idea of introducing the European Qualification Framework and e-Competence framework in Slovenia, but they were rather critical in their opinion and some of them even claimed that they didn’t see any particular benefit of such an endeavour. Especially participants without formal education in informatics endorsed the idea of EQF, as they saw the possibility of obtaining a formal recognition of their competences and knowledge through this system. In addition, 24 participants took a Proximity Profile test; all of them found the test useful and all of them declared that the results met their expectations. At the end of Module 4, participants had to identify three categories of knowledge/modules from the EUCIP Core and/or IT Administrator syllabi and to order them according to their preferences.
　　5.5 Module 5—Collaborative Development of Educational Resources Based on the EUCIP Standard
　　Based on the participants’ preferences, five workgroups were formed by tutors: A7: Legal and Ethical Issues (six participants); B2: Data Management and Use (six participants), B4: User Interface and Web Design (7 participants), M1: PC Hardware (six participants), M2: Operating Systems (six participants). On one hand, such composition of groups ensured an even distribution, and on the other the majority of participants were assigned the topic of their highest defined priority. Before designing the content of their online course, the groups were instructed to cover the knowledge categories that they recognized as important for their work. In the first two weeks of Module 5, workgroups had to select a group leader and produce an outline of their course according to the guidelines given by the tutors. The course outlines were then analyzed and commented on by the tutors, after which the groups had five weeks to prepare courseware materials. For this part, the tutors offered a series of suggestions and hints about the most appropriate tools for presentation of different courseware elements. This final task needed very dedicated and permanent on-time collaboration by all group members.
　　6. Self-Evaluation
　　Each course module ended with two questionnaires: self-evaluation questionnaire and module evaluation. The questionnaires were designed in the form of simple statements, and participants were asked to respond to these statements on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1—not at all true to 5—very true for me. Participants were generally more reluctant to evaluate the modules than their learning outcomes. Approximately 20% more participants evaluated the first module and 9% more participants evaluated the second module than giving an evaluation of their own learning outcomes of these modules. The frequencies of responses to the third and the fourth module are levelled on both questionnaires, while approximately 8% less participants evaluated Module 5 than their own learning outcomes. With the first one—the self-evaluation questionnaire, participants of the course were expected to reflect on their knowledge increase while studying the materials of the modules and fulfilling their assignments. Only 72.1% of participants who originally enrolled for the online course responded to the first questionnaire, 46% responded to the second, 38% to the third, 28% to the fourth, and 23% to the fifth. Such results could be explained either by indifference or forgetfulness of the participants, since they were always specifically invited at the end of the module to fill-in both questionnaires. From the results of the self-evaluation questionnaires it is possible to conclude that participants evaluated their study outcomes for each module as above average (< 3) or good (= < 4). Unfortunately, these high average scores were not always reflected, either in the quality of their assignments or in the timeliness of completion. For example, they claimed high proficiency in using Google Docs (4.6) and Wiki (4.1), but they had problems in collaborative tasks of the second module. Also on using eXe Learning software and producing a SCORM package of their own they achieved above-average scores of 3.9 and 4.0 respectively, but only 19 participants managed to complete the task on time. In spite of having had the possibility to address the problems encountered in using the eXe programme and SCORM production through the discussion forum, only a few participants used this option to overcome problems. They also very highly rated their abilities to plan and collaboratively prepare courseware, but their products and the high drop-out rate from their workgroups did not support their claims.
　　7. Evaluation of Modules
　　All modules were evaluated using the same categories: correlation between the objectives and the content presented, level of fulfilment of participants’ expectations, content novelties, adequacy of the modules’ timing, approaches used, usefulness of the content, learning environment, tutor support, and overall grade of the module. The participants were asked to respond to statements on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1—not at all true to 5—very true for me. Participants’ evaluation of Module 1 shows that the participants assigned the highest possible scores of 5 or 4 to all categories, only 4% of the participants did not feel that they had upgraded their knowledge on the use of Moodle, and 5% of them claimed that the content of the module was not useful for their work. In evaluating Module 2, only 3% of the participants assigned the lowest grade 1 to tutor’s support and timing of the course, and a further 6% gave grade 2 to tutors’ support, while 56% and 38% assigned the highest respective grade (5) to the same categories. However, marks 5 and 4 are prevailing in the assessment of all categories of the evaluation. But, in spite of the prevailing high scores assigned to all categories of the second module, their difficulties in completing this module’s activities did not support their evaluation scores.
　　The highest grades were assigned to all evaluation categories of Module 3. Apart from the adequacy of timing, which was given the highest score by 44% of the participants, all other categories got the highest score (5) by from over 50% up to 78% of participants(tutor’s support). The reason for that might be that the tutors had also learned from experiences obtained in the first two modules, and they also participated more frequently in the discussion forums and commented on participants’ efforts. In evaluating Module 4, again, the majority of the participants assigned high scores to all categories (4, or 5), but 6% of them were (according to their responses (low scores)) already familiar with the EUCIP system, and e-competences, therefore they did not upgrade their knowledge, in addition 11% of participants obviously did not see the content of the module as being useful. Such a response from the participants came as rather a surprise, since we had thought that the major reason for joining the online course was to gain a deeper insight into the EUCIP system and programme.
　　In the fifth module, high scores (4 or 5) were assigned to all categories of the evaluation, but 20% assigned low scores to tutors’ support, and 10% (one participant) did not upgrade his/her knowledge. We added some additional questions to the questionnaire since we wanted to get participants’ reflections on their own efforts in collaborative design of their online course; 70% of them claimed that the workgroup they were assigned to was appropriate (score 5), 60% were satisfied with the number of workgroups (score 5), and an equal percent were happy with the number of participants within the group; 40% assigned the highest score to the clarity of instructions for drafting the course, and 30% to the clarity and usefulness of tutors’ hints for preparing courseware; 50% assigned the highest score to the usefulness of the prior knowledge gained in previous modules, but only 10% were satisfied with the level of collaboration within group, while 40% claimed that the level of collaboration was low or extremely low. This is not in line with the self-evaluation results where the average number of scores assigned to the collaboration of participants in online course preparation was 4.5. The feeling of low level of collaboration within workgroups during the production of courseware was further confirmed by the number of participants within each workgroup who actually contributed to the design of the course: workgroup A7(two out of six); workgroup B2 (three out of six); workgroup B4 (five out of seven); workgroup M1 (four out of six) and workgroup M2 (two out of six). Participants were also asked to evaluate the level of satisfaction with the online course they had produced. They were quite critical, as only three participants were satisfied with the course they had produced and chose score 5, while all the others were either partially satisfied(score 4 or 3) or not at all (score 2).
　　8. Final Results
　　As the final result of the course, which ended on the 10th of April 2011, participants managed to design and prepare courseware for 5 online courses, aimed to achieve goals of three EUCIP Core Syllabus knowledge categories (A7, B2 and B4) and selected knowledge areas from two modules of IT Administrator (M1 and M2). For the evaluation of the quality of products, a special method has been developed by the tutors and a respective evaluation template was prepared. The following building blocks of the course were evaluated: (1) diversity of teaching tools used (28 points maximum), (2) adequacy of content selection (maximum 50 points), and (3) adequacy of didactical approaches (50 points maximum). Results of the evaluation are presented in Table 1.
　　From the results in Table 1, it can be concluded that the major strengths of the online courses produced by five working groups of participants are the variety of teaching tools used and well structured content divided into sub-topics, which results in coherent teaching materials. The major weakness is the coverage of the content, which is in all cases but one (B4) incomplete. This drawback is on the one hand the result of a low level cooperation among participants of the group and poor management of the group work by group leaders, and on the other an irresponsible attitude of some groups’ members who ignored the fact that their contributions would be of utmost importance for the quality of the final product. The level of cooperation during the 5th module of the online course confirmed our previous observation, that some Slovenian teachers are not ready to accept the responsibility for their own learning process and for consequent actions needed to successfully reach the learning goals.
　　Table 1 Evaluation of online courses prepared by five working groups of participants.
　　


　　9. What did We Learn?
　　Monitoring the participants throughout the duration of the course has shown that transferring the content of the course from one cultural background into another was not a trivial task. We should be more familiar with the real expectations and prior knowledge of the course participants before we start designing the content of each module. From the weaknesses of each module that participants openly expressed in the modules’evaluation questionnaires we have learned that—particularly in the first module, from their perspective and needs, the content was presented too mechanically, while they needed didactical guidance on the use of Moodle. In fact, for each task assigned they expected to be given an example together with didactical instructions so that it could be used as a model for their own products. This shortcoming was corrected in Module 3 where they were given an example of the SCORM, whereupon they followed the example in preparing SCORMs of their own teaching units. In evaluating Module 2, again some participants were missing didactical instructions on how to integrate and effectively use Web 2.0 tools in a controlled learning environment. Some of them expected tutors to enter their Google Docs and Wiki and help them carrying out the tasks since they were not able to work collaboratively without the tutors’ support. One participant claimed that too many tools were presented for her capabilities and so she lagged behind. In evaluating the content of Module 3, participants did not mention any weakness. One even claimed that he got exactly what he needed and that he was eager to provide his colleagues with the content of this module. In the case of Module 4 some technical problems with sound were mentioned as a weakness. One participant expected the translation of the EUCIP core and IT Administrator curricula in Slovenian, a claim which we considered unusual for someone who works in informatics. From the participants’ feedbacks, especially in the first and the second module, we carefully designed the content of Module 5. As the final task of the fourth module, the participants had to identify three knowledge categories from EUCIP Core syllabus and/or modules from the IT Administrator syllabus and arrange them in order of their preferences. From participants’ preferences the tutors selected five categories and divided participants into groups, taking their preferences into account as much as possible. We have also structured the design of their online course into two phases. First, they had to prepare the draft structure of the course according to guidance and then develop their own online course in a trial area of each group. These efforts paid off since the participants, who in spite of all their problems completed their assignments, contributed to the quality of the courses produced and at the same time successfully completed the EUCIP course. The results allow us to conclude that benefits from this online course are mutual; participants have deepened their knowledge and we, the tutors, have learned that playing a tutor’s role is a demanding task that requires patience, persistence and more than just a bit of diplomacy in order to be completed satisfactorily.
　　10. Conclusions
　　The Italian online course was successfully adapted and modified to meet the needs of Slovenian informatics teachers. The adaptation refers primarily to adding elements that according to a series of research results proved to support sustainability and better orientation of participants throughout the online course. It has been found that, from the participants’ viewpoint, the most demanding part of the course were collaborative tasks, which is an observation indicating that our teachers were poorly prepared to take the responsibility of their learning process. The drop-out rate (68%) was considerable but in line with our expectations. However, additional research would be needed in order to find out the real reasons behind the drop-out, since during the course, a significant number of participants notified us that they were unable to continue in the course due to the high workload. The interest of the community of practice in the EUCIP certification scheme was extremely low, as neither member of the Slovenian Society Informatika nor informatics professional who was personally invited to take part in the discussion forum ever entered into discussions at the special forum EUCIP in Slovenia. A similarly indifferent attitude was also observed in institutions and individuals in charge of the education of informatics teachers at all levels. But those teachers who persisted in the course as well as the tutors are proud to have overcome all challenges and managed to finish the course delivering useful products of reasonable professional and didactical quality.
　　Acknowledgments
　　The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the Leonardo da Vinci fund for financial support of the project. The authors also grateful for the support of the Italian Informatics Society (AICA), in particular to Pierfranco Ravotto for his advice on the structure of the online course, Paolo Schg?r for his swift answer to our needs regarding EUCIP syllabi, and Roberto Bellini and Carlo Tiberti for their access to and help with the Proximity Profile questionnaire. The project would not have been possible without the dedicated and hard work of all participants. For their persistence in the course, the authors would like to express their deepest gratitude.
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