Better Employability for Everyone with APEX

The IT sector in the EU is one of the fastest growing ones, and more importantly, it is one of the key sectors central to building a green, digital and resilient economy. The demand for developers in the EU has registered a continuous annual increase, a trend explicit across all EU member states. Preliminary research carried out by the project consortium indicated that growing up with ICT is not enough to develop the digital skills necessary for the digital economy, and that ICT curricula (even basic level courses) offered to non-ICT majors should be revised in order to better prepare future graduates for the needs of a digital workplace. Low-code software is software that can be fully customized with a minimal amount of programming. Low-code development still requires some basic programming skills, but it is faster, cheaper, and easier to learn. This project was formed to support the digital transformation of HE, strenghten the resilience and capacity of educators and students, to modernize the IT curricula, to offer non-technical majors with opportunities to advance their IT knowledge and employability and fill in the gap between the demand and supply of IT developers.

The project was aimed to align higher education with market demands by involving employers in course design, enhancing digital skills, and fostering employability. It addressed curriculum gaps by engaging with Oracle and local SMEs to develop IT courses, improving educators' and students' digital competencies. The focus was on expanding IT training to non-technical students and integrating digital readiness across disciplines. By creating new courses through business-academic partnerships and emphasizing low-code programming, the project’s objective was to accelerate curriculum updates and boost student employability. This collaborative approach would bring benefits to local businesses by providing a skilled workforce, fostering productivity, and driving economic growth. Higher education institutions (academic stuff and students) would get learning materials for courses in 7 languages.

Project teams developed the advanced and the short digital course on low-code programming introducing students to the foundations of APEX and basic application and database design. Endeavor included gathering, organizing, adjusting and integrating business cases into learning material. Advanced and short course was either accredited or integrated into existing courses. Learning materials was prepared in 7 languages – English and in 6 languages of the project consortium. Each e-book has more than 400 pages supported by Q&A, source code of applications, scripts, and video tutorials. The courses were implemented in Moodle LMS, the backups are offered in open access to any interested HE. Two flavors of short course were assembled to meet two common situations. The testing and piloting the courses was conducted in all project partners institutions. To get students better insight into labor market eight webinars are provided on Youtube. LTTA and all ME among target groups were conducted. By the end of the project eighteen articles were written, presented in different international conferences and published in corresponding proceedings.

PR1-A: Advanced bachelor's level extra-curricular course on low-code: Ready-to-use Moodle courses in seven languages (3 ECTS). Each contains sections: General (Announcements, Syllabus), Learning resources (links to textbooks, scripts, applications and video tutorials), Quiz for advanced course(25 random questions), Project Assignment (the student must upload their project documentation; the assignment is then graded by the teacher), Evaluation (link to course evaluation form) and Certificate (if the student passes the quiz and project assessment, a certificate is automatically generated which can be printed). The links to specific languages differs; the URL of the English version is: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=27 The corresponding English textbook is in attachment mainEN.pdf (this is one of 7 versions of the textbook). This course is not public as it contains actual participants and teachers. However, the learning resources are publicly accessible ( access as guest, no password). PR1-B: Advanced bachelor's level extra-curricular course on low-code: The Moodle course (3 ECTS) backup is provided with sections: General (Announcements, Syllabus), Learning resources (links to textbook, scripts, applications and video tutorials), Quiz for advanced course(25 random questions), Student project assignment (student must upload project documentation; assignment is then graded by teacher), Evaluation (link to course evaluation form), and Certificate (if student passes quiz and project grading, a certificate is automatically generated that can be printed). The link is: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=28 . This course is public ( access as guest, no password). Download the backup file and restore it on another Moodle site. PR2-A: Short digital course on low-code programming with APEX: Ready-to-use Moodle course (1 ECTS). It contains sections: General (Announcements, Syllabus), Learning resources (links to selected textbook chapters, scripts, applications and video tutorials), Quiz for short course (10 random questions), Project Assignment (the student must upload their project documentation; the assignment is then graded by the teacher), Evaluation (link to course evaluation form) and Certificate (if the student passes the quiz and project assessment, a certificate is automatically generated which can be printed). URL is: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=27 This course is not public as it contains actual participants and teachers. However, the learning resources are publicly accessible ( access as guest, no password). Textbooks are available in 7 languages (i.e. Slovenian is in attachment main.SI.pdf) PR2-B: Short digital course on low-code programming with APEX: The Moodle course (1 ECTS) backup is provided with sections: General (Announcements, Syllabus), Learning resources (links to textbook, scripts, applications and video tutorials), Quiz for advanced course(10 random questions), Student project assignment (student must upload project documentation; assignment is then graded by teacher), Evaluation (link to course evaluation form), and Certificate (if student passes quiz and project grading, a certificate is automatically generated that can be printed). The link is: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=30 This course is public ( access as guest, no password). Download the backup file and restore it on another Moodle site. PR2-C: Short digital course on low-code programming with APEX: The Moodle course (4/10 ECTS) backup is provided with sections: General (Announcements, Syllabus), Learning resources (links to textbook, scripts, applications and video tutorials), Quiz for advanced course(10 random questions), The link is: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=30 This course is public ( access as guest, no password). Download the backup file and restore it on another Moodle site. PR3 - 6 webinars providing labor market insights: 8 webinars are provided to help students get better labour insight. 1. Mr. Aleš Kravos, Slovenia (Consultant, The RIGHT THING Solutions); 31 min 6 sec 2. Mr. Daniel Huha, Croatia (Consultant, Bilog; 31 min 33 sec 3. Mr. Potr Kurzynoga, Poland (Principal Data Specialist, Oracle); 49 min 22 sec 4. Mr. Przemek Staniszewski, Poland (CEO, Pretius Low-code); 27 min 18 sec 5. Mr. Žiga Bucaj, Slovenia (Head of Development, Bank of Slovenia); 44min 14 sec 6. Prof. Vjeran Strahonja, Prof. Michal Kvet, Prof. Alkiviadis Tsimpris, Larisa Hrustek (PhD Student), Prof. Alenka Baggia, Prof. Dijana Oreški, Mr. Thanasis Angeioplastis (PhD Student), Prof. Werner Retschitzegger, Prof. Wieland Schwinger, Prof. Dimitrios Varsamis; 39 min 54 sec 7. Prof. Wieland Schwinger, Austria; 11 min 8 sec 8. Mr. Aljaž Mali, Slovenia (CEO, The RIGHT THING Solutions). Synthesised voice - invitation to start with BeeAPEX textbook on Low-code development; 15 min 22 sec Webcasts are available on: https://www.youtube.com/pl and https://www.youtube.com/@fakultetazaorganizacijskev2300 PR4 - 12 case studies generated from the business sector: The booklets in 7 languages takes reader beyond the fundamentals, presenting twelve engaging business cases from verbal description, over each tech detail to solve a problem. Each case is carefully documented to provide a holistic understanding of application development from a business, data and user interface perspective. This part include applications for businesses, communities/associations and general applicable user authorization and management. In each business case, reader will explore: Business view of the case, Problem definition, Use cases, Logical and relational data model, Application interfaces and Supplementary learning material. Booklets with 12 business cases are available publicly (access as guest, no password) on: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=32 An example in Greek language is attached (CaseStudiesBeeAPEX_GR.pdf). PR5 - 6 academic articles: At the time of reporting 18 articles were presented at different international conferences and published in corresponding proceedings. They present different aspects of the project itself as well as project results. For exapmple: BeeAPEX at VIVID conference 2022, Say yes to no code, Getting started with low-code, Alphas of Low Code Development project: BeeAPEX Case, Ιntegration of Oracle Apex Enviroment in Database Courses of Computer, Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering Department of International Hellenic University and others. All articles are available in the corresponding Proceedings as as well publicly (access as guest) on: https://beeapex.eu/course/view.php?id=33