Background

To get secure and attractive employment seamen must comply with the qualification requirements as set out by regulations. Without the required competencies no sailing on ships is possible. Vocational training and the lifelong acquisition of skills for the maritime sector is governed by standards worldwide - all must demonstrate the competences against exactly the same rule: the Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping as agreed in 1995 (STCW ´95).

This should make a European/worldwide harmonised training for seafarers easily to realise - especially when keeping in mind the official language of shipping is English. Different training approaches (also partly facilitated by the European Community) have been concerned with this problem. As a merit outcome e.g. there is a worldwide uniform certification system or subjects of possible curricula for obtaining a licence of competency through academic studies have been more specified

But until now the worldwide system of teaching in the maritime sector has been heuristic and mainly based on the traditional “chalk and talk” approach. Even if a learner / teacher is aware what thematic headlines has to be dealt with will be difficult to fill the different place holders with the most recent, didactically conditioned and ideological freed contents. Mostly the necessary expertise - existent at the various colleges or academies - has not been deposited and archived in any form so far. As a next barrier knowledge elements to be traded with may be not accessible from outside, given in the respective national language only, or interfaces to pre-designed lessons are not provided.

Exchange of expert knowledge between national training providers remains slow and fragmented at best. This clear gap in maritime knowledge transfer is exactly where the new approach is targeted. The aim is to develop a simple, sustainable and transferable system that standardises the description, integration and structure of educational content. Inherent in the system are controls to manage the quality of the content and an improvement mechanism that is based on a rating system to be used by all parties involved. The system works on the basis of give and take.

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