The ECDL Certification of ICT Usage Skills in the Italian Universities Maria Carla Calzarossa Dip. Informatica e Sistemistica Università di Pavia, Italy mcc@alice.unipv.it Paolo Ciancarini Dip. Scienze dell’Informazione Università di Bologna, Italy cianca@cs.unibo.it Paolo Maresca Dip. Informatica e Sistemistica Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy paolo.maresca@unina.it Luisa Mich Dip. Informatica e Studi Aziendali Università di Trento, Italy luisa.mich@.unitn.it Nello Scarabottolo Dip. Tecnologie dell’Informazione Università di Milano, Italy nello.scarabottolo@unimi.it Abstract We present the results of a monitoring exercise whose objectives were to analyze the experiences of the Italian Universities in the framework of the ECDL programme and to assess the impact of the ECDL certification in the Universities. Our investigation focused on the ECDL projects carried out by 50 Universities in the year 2004. The analysis has shown that the ECDL certification was used by the majority of the Universities to assess the basic computer skills of their students. On the contrary, the organizational and teaching profiles of the Universities varied as a function of their size. 1. Introduction The Italian Government, following the EU Lisbon summit held in the year 2000 [1], started a program to increase among the citizens the ability of using information technologies. Special attention was devoted to the University students: the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research made a specific choice, inserting in all University curricula credits devoted to acquire some specific knowledge of ICT technologies. The development of basic ICT abilities in our Higher Education system is hindered by the high heterogeneity of practices and policies following from different educational priorities, professional goals and funding sources. Establishing a practical benchmark capable of defining a good nation-wide educational ICT profile is quite difficult. A practice that has worked well in one context, may not work at all in a different one. The wide diversity of educational systems employed in Italian Universities prevented the transfer of practices from one environment to another. The Ministry then decided to endorse the standard of the European Computer Driving License (ECDL). This programme addresses the problem of establishing a benchmark of basic ICT skills, i.e., skills that everyone should possess [10]. The ECDL programme was initially introduced in Finland and then promoted at European level [3] by CEPIS (Council of European Professional Informatics Societies http://www.cepis.org ). Currently, the governing body of the programme is the European Computer Driving Licence Foundation (ECDL-F http://www.ecdl.com ). AICA, the Italian member of CEPIS, is the certification authority that manages the programme in our country. The main features of the ECDL programme can be summarized as follows: • internationality: 137 countries world-wide have adopted the programme; the certification exam, based on the so-called QTB (Question and Test Base), is available in 32 languages; • integration between academia and industry: the programme is supported by the national professional societies that integrate professional and academic competences; • technological neutrality: the programme defines ICT skills independently of hardware and software vendors; in particular, it is possible to obtain the certificate using only open source non proprietary technologies. The ECDL certificate proves that its recipient possesses some basic skills in using a computer, such as editing a document with a word processor, preparing a table using a spreadsheet, querying a database, browsing the Web. The ECDL syllabus consists of seven modules: 1. Basic concepts of information technology