Practitioner
Higher National Unit specification
General information for centres
Unit title: ICT Support in Education: Practitioner
Unit code: F81L34
Unit purpose:
This Unit develops the candidate’s knowledge and understanding of the concept of ICT technical support in an educational establishment. The strategy adopted is a process driven approach aimed at ICT operations in all sizes of educational institutions. The approach modularises the functionality of technical support under the broad categories of Reactive, Proactive, Change and Strategic. This Unit will benefit individuals involved in ICT technical support in educational establishments and may include teaching assistants, technicians, management and supporting consultants.
On completion of the Unit the candidate should be able to:
1 Describe the role of the service desk and demonstrate an understanding of security management within an ICT educational infrastructure.
2 Demonstrate an understanding of the purpose of incident and problem handling within an ICT educational infrastructure.
3 Demonstrate an understanding of the purpose of change, release and patch management.
4 Demonstrate an understanding of the function of configuration management.
Credit points and level: 2 HN credits at SCQF level 7: (16 SCQF credit points at SCQF level 7*)
*SCQF credit points are used to allocate credit to qualifications in the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF). Each qualification in the Framework is allocated a number of SCQF credit points at an SCQF level. There are 12 SCQF levels, ranging from Access 1 to Doctorates.
Recommended prior knowledge and skills:
Access to this Unit will be at the discretion of the centre, however, it would be beneficial for the candidate to have some knowledge of ICT support in an educational establishment.
Core Skills:
There are no opportunities to develop Core Skills in this Unit.
Context for delivery:
If this Unit is delivered as part of a Group Award, it is recommended that it should be taught and assessed within the subject area of the Group Award to which it contributes.
This Unit develops the candidate’s knowledge and understanding of the role of ICT service support to determine technology and resource requirements to provide the service necessary to meet the needs of all users of the ICT infrastructure. The coherent integration of people, process and technology extends the concept of an infrastructure approach to ICT support in education.
Assessment: A holistic assessment covering Outcomes 1, 2, 3 and 4 will consist of 40 questions, sampling all Outcomes, presented in a random order of equal weighting.
The assessment is closed-book and is undertaken in supervised conditions. A candidate should complete the assessment within a specified time. Candidates may not bring any notes, books, handouts or other materials to the assessment event. The assessment questions presented, must change significantly for each assessment opportunity. Testing may be undertaken either electronically or be paper-based. The assessment event must be invigilated and there must be no communication between candidates.
Communication with the invigilator is restricted to matters relating to the administration of the assessment.
A candidate must answer at least 60% of the total questions correctly on order to achieve the Unit.
If a candidate requires re-assessment, a significant proportion of different questions, covering all Outcomes should be presented. The questions used in the re-assessment must be significantly different from those used in the original assessment. The assessment conditions of the re-assessment must be the same as the original assessment instrument.
The candidate may undertake assessment using e-testing facilities. There is no requirement to seek approval to use e-assessment technologies. Normal standards for validity and reliability should be observed. Please see the following SQA publications for further information on e-assessment:
1 SQA Guidelines on On-line Assessment for Further Education (March 2003).
2 Assessment and Quality Assurance in Open and Distance Learning (February 2001).
If a centre is presenting this assessment on-line the following assessment methods, where appropriate, may be selected:
♦ Multiple choice
♦ Drag and drop
♦ Multiple response
♦ Mix and match
♦ A combination of the above
It is expected that the questions will be of the multi-choice variety. Centres may consider the use of alternative question types, particularly if using Computer Assisted Assessment approaches. However, care should be taken that the questions are valid and at an appropriate level. The use of simple true/false question responses is unlikely to achieve this.
