Pedagogical planning: Documents, mobility, and reuse

Portugal, like other European states, has conducted educational policies and reforms to achieve common goals regarding the European education space. These reforms seek to create an education system based on skills development, and not on the transmission of knowledge, which included the implementation of a system of easily readable and comparable degrees, designed to simplify comparison between qualifications across Europe. This changings was supported on a credit system (ECTS) and the adoption of the Diploma Supplement by all countries involved. However, when we do a search on the Internet we find an enormous diversity in the description of the Portuguese modules that integrate the curricula of undergraduate and master´s degrees. The access to this information is not always available in the official courses websites, thereby students have difficult making a decision when trying to join in a mobility program. In this context, this article describes the process of data collection performed in order to determine the most relevant elements used to define a courses by teachers and to evaluate the importance of the descriptors suggested in the ECTS system. This process ends with the development of a prototype for the definition of courses. Rather than building a technologically advanced application, this prototype had as its primary objective the establishment of a “common language” in the definition of each unit that is really useful and to facilitate student mobility at national and European level.