How Can We Establish Suitable Educational Programs for Technical Communication in Denmark?

Jan Engberg

As part of the ERASMUS+ project TecCOMFrame, funded by the EU, tekom Denmark in cooperation with Aarhus University, School of Communication and Culture, are organizing a workshop event for practitioners, teachers and students on competences that are relevant for the modern tasks of technical communicators.

Why Denmark Was Selected as One of the Venues for a Dissemination Event

Aarhus University, represented by Prof. Jan Engberg, has been part of the ERASMUS+ project TecCOMFrame since 2015. This project involves eight universities and tekom Germany as partners. The project aims at enhancing the quality of education in technical communication (TC) at university level in Europe. Its main focus is facilitating course offerings in the field of technical communication across countries and universities, thus meeting the requirements for highly educated experts in this field.

In this context, Denmark and Aarhus University are a a perfect example:
Denmark does not provide official education in technical communication; however, the BA and MA degrees in International Business Communication, which include courses in image and marketing communication, cover similar theme areas and Arhus University offers Technical Translation, which is also related.

Therefore the International Business Communication program at Arhus may be a good platform for incorporating technical communication studies and starting a new educational profile from an existing one. 

The three main objectives of the TecCOMFrame project are relevant in the Danish context:

1. To construct a competence framework which functions as a development tool for designing educational programs at university level, thus offering planners a structured set of competences to choose from.
2. To present prototype curricula at different academic levels and different scales as inspiration. These curricula have a wide range: starting with specialization modules within existing BA and MA programs, to full MA programs combined with a range of BA programs up to stand-alone consecutive and coordinated BA and MA programs.
3. To disseminate knowledge about the framework and the curricula to interested parties, especially in countries without a tradition of offering this type of education.In this blog post, we will carry on discussing the third main objective, the dissemination of knowledge about the framework.

To get more information on the prototype curricula and on how the competence framework helped to set up the curricula, please join the webinar held by Prof. Sissi Closs and Prof. Jan Engberg on April 3, 2018.Due to this reasons, Denmark was selected as one of the venues for a dissemination event. The event is held on March 21, 2018 at Aarhus University. Click here to find more information.

The Contents of the Workshop

The participants of this event will discuss and generate ideas for designing a technical communication program within the framework of the existing BA program in International Business Communication offered at Aarhus University. 

During the workshop, students, practitioners and university teachers will get together in groups to discuss issues of the competence framework and to find sources of inspiration, for example from conversing with two university professors who have experience with different types of programs.

A wide scope of different knowledge and expertise will gather around the discussion table: practitioners know the requirements of the industry, students know the competences they have actually acquired during their university studies, and university teachers know the aims of the current university programs. We hope to generate qualified input for all aspects of technical communication and competences that Aarhus University should prioritize in the planning process of a new technical communication profile.

Three core questions will be discussed:

• Which disciplines are considered to be central to the planned BA specialization
• Which are the relevant competences (for example regarding the competence framework) that must be taught in the profile so that Business Communication graduates are qualified for technical communication jobs?
• Which are the competences that practitioners believe can be covered by on-the-job-training rather than through a university program?

The key emphasis is to initiate a process targeted towards designing a BA profile in technical communication. However, the event also focusses on creating a framework for building competence descriptions for technical communication jobs in the industry during the workshops, especially by including the competence framework in these discussions.

We strongly believe that this event and the workshop will be relevant not only for academic course developers and student participants, but also highly interesting for practitioners and managers in the TC industry.

If you are interested to join, please read more and do your registration here
or contact:

Per Harbo Sørensen
Spokesperson and delegate at tekom Danmark
E-mail: per.soerensen(at)worldtranslation.dk
Phone: +45 8620 4844