Transparency in the New DAW and DAM Curricula

Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0

A few days ago, a draft Royal Decree¹ was published updating certain Vocational Training qualifications². Among them, modifications are proposed to the qualifications of Higher Technician³ in Web Application Development (DAW)⁴ and Higher Technician in Cross-platform Application Development (DAM)⁵, two of the three higher degrees in the Computer Science and Communications family. Proposals for changes to these modifications can be submitted until March 30. Up to this point, the process seems appropriate.

What is the main issue? Primarily in the format. A PDF of 815 pages which, by the way, takes quite a while to download from the Ministry’s⁶ server (even though it only weighs 8.3 MB). The document completely lacks an index, so you have to find alternative ways to access the information about the qualification or module you want to consult. Once you find it, it turns out that it indicates the new content of the articles and modules without making direct reference to what they are specifically modifying.

In other words, if you want to know what modifications are proposed for a specific module, first you have to wait for the PDF to load, then perform a search until you find the page where the information is and, finally, compare line by line the learning outcomes, evaluation criteria, and contents with those currently in force. If I were to be cynical, I’d say this kind of thing is done to make comparison difficult and have fewer people make change proposals. As I’m not, I attribute it to very little thought being given to the publication format.

Transparency not only consists of publishing information openly but also in presenting it so that it can be analyzed in the simplest way possible.

But you can’t criticize something without a proposal, so I got to work to develop mine. I have never taught any module in a higher cycle, so I don’t have enough experience to know if the changes in the new drafts are good, bad or insufficient. My small contribution will be to facilitate that the information about the proposed changes reaches the right people, who are the teachers who currently teach these modules and know their deficiencies and needs better than anyone.

I was more or less clear from the beginning that a good option would be to mark the changes as they are seen in the code when a modification proposal is made on a Github repository for example. I started investigating and found dubdiff, an open source software created by Adam Brown that highlights changes on any text exactly in this way. I also needed a template that would allow different sections to be easily accessed, both from a desktop and a mobile system. Searching a bit, I found a proposal on CodePen created by Monica Wheeler. I thank both of them for their previous work to make this idea come to fruition.

Without further delay, you can access the DAW modifications portal and the DAM modifications portal. I hope it’s useful for teachers of these modules and that you can more easily check the changes being made, with the aim of proposing your ideas. We need your contributions.