MICE CONSORTIUM--FIVE EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES ON THE WAY TO A JOINT AND COORDINATED MASTER PROGRAMME IN INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING

摘要

This paper will report on increasing cooperation between European Universities, working in the field of Communication Engineering. For a long time the partners have maintained contacts between partner universities in Eastern Europe (Zilina, Gyor, Sofia and St. Petersburg) and Western Europe (Dublin, Lille, Brest, Valencia and Leipzig). First we discussed the students and teacher exchange, the possibilities of doing projects at other partner Universities. About five years ago we took on board the consequences of the Bologna process dealing with the transfer from Diploma to a Bachelor/Master system, the credit points, the diploma supplement, joint lectures and seminars. For example, we were able to “synchronise” the content of Bachelor and Master Programmes. As a result of this close cooperation we have created an annual European Students Meeting (ESM), co-sponsored by the European Union, and which strongly follows the Bologna rules. 30-40 students from the 6 partner universities spend 2 weeks studying and discussing ICT topics such as wireless and optical communication or NGN. Furthermore, these meetings have increased intercultural communication awareness through the seminars. These ESM's were hosted in Leipzig in 2006, in Lille in 2007, and will be held in Zilina in March 2008. Two years ago we started to improve our cooperation between each other in the Master studies programme. For this purpose, a consortium called MICE (Masters in Information and Communications Engineering) was created. Members of the consortium are the DIT Dublin, Ireland; the HfT Leipzig, Germany; the Telecom Lille 1, France; the UPV Valencia, Spain; and the University of Zilina, Slovakia. Beside promoting our existing Master courses, the members have made the first step towards creating an international study programme called Master of Sciences in Information and Communications Engineering. The two year master's programme will be carried out in at least two different partner universities. Therefore, these students have a possibility of becoming familiar with the different European languages and different cultures of a minimum of two European countries. With this master programme, closely connected with the needs of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, it is hoped to attract European and non-European students. To guarantee the quality of this new Master's course the consortium members will make some significant changes as with our own national Master courses: - We have already performed the selection of core fields (basic knowledge in the field of ICT) and we will make further steps to develop an integrated (matched) basic part of MICE - We will include language and intercultural courses - Based on the matched (at present) and integrated (in future) basic studies and using the strengths of each university we will offer five different fields of specialization (including research) - We will use our very close contacts with ICT companies acting as global players to educate masters in ICE, who are prepared to work both in the engineering field and in international teams We will incorporate into our studies international projects, which will be carried out by international student teams from the participating universities. The results of these international projects will be discussed during joint meetings of the team a draft of the study programme will be then presented. In the paper we will describe the challenges resulting from the cultural and educational differences of the participating universities as well as the problems which arise due to the different national rules and laws.