ECTS and ECVET, Comparisons and Contrasts

HUMART outcomes
The outcomes of the SQF Humanities and Arts (HUMART) project are now available on the website. You are welcome to comment on the documents. Download ECTS and ECVET: Comparisons and Contrasts.
1. Introduction
In 2010, TUNING published my article entitled, ‘ECTS and ECVET, Comparisons and Contrasts’. This article was an annex to the final report for sectoral project in the Social Sciences. It was produced, on request, as a background to the possible attribution of ECTS credit ranges to qualifications in this sector at EQF levels 3 and 4, that is at the two levels immediately preceding the most frequent entry point of learners into higher education. The attribution of such credit ranges was one of the six major intended outcomes of the project. Given the great uncertainty about ECVET still pertaining at the moment the project moved towards its conclusion and, principally, the uncertainty concerning the way in which ECVET credits would be allocated in practice, it was thought impossible to pursue in depth this intended outcome of the project. Such a judgment was effectively inevitable given that the long-promised Users Guide for ECVET, a guide, which, it was hoped, would furnish answers to all the questions and doubts about ECVET raised in my article, and by others, had not yet been published.
This uncertainty still prevailed when the last adjustments were made to the article in early September 2010. Obviously, this situation still obtained at the time that this HUMART sectoral framework project held its initial meeting shortly after in early October 2010. The potential for making proposals for possible ECTS credit ranges for EQF levels 3 and 4, on the basis of equivalent ECVET credits, for this sector, could only be seriously advanced, during the course of the project, if greater clarification about ECVET were forthcoming and if this demonstrated real compatibility, in practical and not just theoretical terms, between ECVET and ECTS credits.
4. Conclusion
At the conclusion of this brief survey of credit attribution in the BIF sector, it seems an inescapable fact that it is going to prove no easier to propose ECTS credit ranges for EQF levels 3 and 4 within the HUMART sector than it was for the Social Sciences sector which preceded this project. Unless, of course, further clarification and simplification about ECVET credit attribution over a wide range of VET sectors is forthcoming in the next few months.
This is a disturbing conclusion which might be driving the HEI and non-HEI sectors further apart rather than achieving the greatly-to-be-desired end of bringing them closer together. This is all the more true given the unavoidable further conclusion that quite a number of the other questions about the way in which ECVET will be constructed and operated in practice have not been given satisfactory answers in these two groups of documents.
Nevertheless, it remains possible that the breaking down of barriers between the two educational sectors may still succeed. At best, it would appear that the transfer of credit from further/continuing to higher education is likely to proceed purely on the basis of comparisons of statements of learning outcomes for units which are at equivalent levels/cycles of the EQF and of the QF EHEA. However and because learning outcomes are not of themselves easily measurable and translatable into numbers of credits, this will only be achievable where there is clear and strict pre-agreement between individual further/continuing educational institutions, on the one hand, and individual HEIs, on the other hand. This is something that has been in existence now for some considerable time and before the idea of ECVET was conceived, although very rarely on a cross-frontier basis.
One can only hope fervently that as ECVET evolves, this pessimistic conclusion may prove to be erroneous. Download ECTS and ECVET: Comparisons and Contrasts.