Despite ever accelerating workplace changes, including rapidly expanding technology access and tools and fast improving information and communication systems, the education system in Kosovo is not yet fully developed to provide high quality research education. To increase the academic level and quality of the education system, continual investments are required; yet as a small country with a relatively small national budget, Kosovo has experienced constraints on the needed investments to drastically transform the quality of the education system.
In this situation, the system of university education in Kosovo is experiencing obstacles in terms of lack of focused research collaboration and output, which may be due to the lack of programs, mainly those of the PhD level in ICT. The absence of such a graduate program in this state contributes to the inability of creating the national human intellectual capacity and technological infrastructure required to become a country that fully integrates the ideas of digital age and knowledge society.
The Programme Country consortium (LNU: Linnaeus University, NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and SEERC: South East European Center) supports the initiative to develop and establish a common national PhD Program for ICT in Kosovo, the Partner Country. The partners will contribute through co-design and transferring and contextualizing the ‘know-how’ expertise of PhD models (example: model for Swedish National Research School Management and Technology, MIT) to curricula customized to the unique situation and circumstances of this new sovereign nation. In this way, the Kosovo higher education system will design and implement a high-quality national program delivered within a higher education infrastructure for the new generation of university students.
The general aim of this project is to create a national curriculum for PhD Program in ICT, with the involvement of three Universities in Kosovo and of Programme Country institutions that have demonstrated long time experience in similar programs. At the first stage, the project will analyze and map existing PhD programs in ICT globally. It will create activities through professional development workshops and training to increase the research qualifications of local staff professors. Finally, it will facilitate the process of establishing the national PhD program individually for the partner institutions, including all the required documentation and human capacities stated as prerequisites from the Accreditation Agency of Kosovo. In order to have a successful implementation of the new national curricula, research and collaboration will be achieved via virtual means in conjunction with experts from LNU, NTNU and SEERC. During the overall scope of the project, the crucial infrastructure will be established in parallel to workshops/study visits/training, which will be offered in order to increase research abilities, including co-supervision and co-mentoring capabilities.
The project’s specific objectives are as follows:
- Establish a national research school in ICT in Kosovo
- Establish a national curriculum for PhD studies in the ICT field with key elements of learning outcomes, goals and skills
- Increase the research competences of Kosovo staff Universities
- Facilitate the accreditation process of the individual universities’ PhD programs to appropriate national bodies
- Implement the national PhD program, register the first generation of graduate students, which will be jointly supervised from Programme and Partner Countries
