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Certificate Guidelines

 

Course Participation

There are no admission restrictions regarding course participation. We recommend that course participants take part in all of the modules, work through the complete course material and check their knowledge by means of the self-tests. Active participation in the discussion forums and learning groups provides further deepening of the acquired knowledge

Certification

Those who register for study in an active course at the German UDS Academy can receive a confirmation of participation for their course performance. Selected courses will also offer a so- called micro-credential. To receive a micro-credential, participants will also have to register for an online proctoring. (At the time of writing this feature is still under development.) Once the micro-credentials are available, we plan to offer options to stack these micro-credentials into micro-degrees. Generally, micro-degrees can be earned in particular courses that require the completion of a selection of micro-credentials to participate. (At the time of writing this feature is still under development.)

Requirements for the Confirmation of Participation

The details of the conditions to receive a confirmation of participation differ between our course categories. Particularly, we offer instructor-paced (or event-based) courses as well as self-paced courses. Instructor-paced courses are offered in the categories “Digital Enlightenment” and “Junior Courses”. Here the following general rules apply:

  1. Every week of the course contains a graded exercise. This must be completed by a certain deadline which is announced in the course. The last week of the course often offers an additional final exam. The teaching team can offer bonus exercises at its own discretion.
  2. Exercises and the final exam take the form of multiple-choice tests, practical programming exercises or peer assessments. In order to participate, course members must be logged in to the learning system with their name and password.
  3. The coursework and examination will be in English language.
  4. A confirmation of participation is received by those who have earned more than 60 percent of the maximum number of points for the sum of all homeworks, graded exercises, peer assessments, and the final exam.

Prep and Preview courses, generally are self-paced. Preview courses do not offer any kind of certification as they only provide a glimpse of our actual study programs. In some cases, Prep courses might offer a confirmation of participation. The details will then be given in the course description.

Evaluation of Exam Performance

  1. Exercises and examinations consist of multiple-choice tasks (with one correct answer), multiple-answer tasks (with multiple correct solutions), practical programming exercises, peer assessment, or a combination of them. There is a clearly defined number of points for every task that can be earned with the correct solution.
  2. With multiple-answer tasks the number of points achieved for a partially correct solution is calculated in the following way. The maximum number of points is divided by the number of correct alternatives and this value is used as the base. For every right alternative that has been correctly selected, the base value will be given. For every false alternative, the base value will be subtracted. If the total result is negative, then 0 points are given. For example, a maximum of 3 points are possible for one task. Three out of five answers are correct. The student has marked two correct and one false. For both of the correct answers, he receives one point each (3 divided by 3), for the false answer one point is subtracted. He, therefore, receives one point for the task.
  3. For programming exercises we often use specialized auto-grading tools. The participant can solve the tasks directly in the web browser. The exercises on these tools consist of the exercise description, some code snippets that have been prepared bey the instructors (optional), hints to solve the task (optional), unit tests to automatically grade the participants’ results (optional).

 

Issuing the Confirmation of Participation

  1. The German UDS Academy is collecting the results of homeworks, exercises, peer assessments, and final exam.
  2. After successfully completing all of the course requirements, the confirmation of participation will be made available through the participant’s profile page on the German UDS Academy. The performance evaluation in confirmation of participation is based on the paragraphs presented in these guidelines. The confirmation of participation is signed by the teacher of the attended course. On the confirmation of participation the participant’s e-mail address (stated in the German UDS Academy enrollment process) is mentioned. At present, this e-mail address serves as a reliable verification feature.
  3. Please take into consideration that it can take up to two weeks before the confirmations of participation are issued.