[lpi-discuss] OpenICDL Project Release 1.0

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday, 29 August 2005 11:47, Torsten Scheck wrote:
> Sean Wheller wrote:

[ ... ]

> Hi Sean,
>
> thank you for pointing to this interesting project. IMHO this is
> very much LPI related. LPI has been asked very often about an
> end-user certification programme, but there has been no clear path
> for LPI to help, so far.
>
> Two years ago I investigated a bit around ECDL (ICDL in Europe).
> What I found, was very promising in terms of making it work for
> Linux. Especially the exam proctor network. See below for a summary
> of my understanding how ECDL works.
>
> This year, I learnt from people, who took the ECDL tests, that ECDL
> was just multiple choice exams aligned to Microsoft Software.
>
> Sean, do you know, how the testing works? Can I insist on being
> tested based on Linux applications? Or is it country-specific?

Torsten,

I was recently involved with this topic. I can't speak for the rest of 
the world, but the way the South African ICDL people were doing it is 
that the cert tests the candidate on the usual types of apps on the 
desktop - word processor, spreadsheet, mailer, browser, etc. So our 
candidate was tested on OOo, Firefox and KMail and the proctor was 
quite happy with that. He wanted to see if the candidate could use a 
word processor, and it didn't have to be Word. 

In South Africa the ICDL people are very keen to promote ICDL on 
Linux. One of the chief reasons is that training companies find the 
Microsoft licenses prohibitively expensive and often have more copies 
than licenses. ICDL has to be very strict with this point. They see 
that this just isn't an issue with FOSS, which opens up many business 
opportunities.

I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of the ICDL exams. I 
expected something very basic like "make this text bold and send that 
email". The reality is that I saw an in-depth exam that thoroughly 
tests the user's ability to use the desktop.

Also, it will be relatively simple to adapt the courseware for Linux - 
no more difficult than say, rewriting a Word module for Word Perfect. 
Each ICDL module maps exactly to a functionally equivalent package on 
Linux.

alan

>
> Cheers,
> Torsten

[ ... ]

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings.co.za
+27 82 337 1935