Improving IT education in Estonian universities

After getting independence in 1992 Estonia started to develop university system from the Soviet model towards the West European model. The restructuring of the higher education is not easy. There is a lack of highly educated people. The reasons for that are manifold: after opening the borders some amount of highly skilled specialists moved abroad, industry and fast growing economy is competing with universities providing higher salaries to the specialists and in general the university work is not ranked on the high level in social status. The fast growing economy demands new kind of skills traditionally not included in the university education. Especially in the area of information technology the problem is big: IT industry is growing fast and demands growing amount of skilled people, To satisfy this demand universities have implemented a development programme in co-operation with the network of some European universities. The development programme has four goals: (1) improvements in technical infrastructure, (2) dramatic growth in the amount of post graduate students to satisfy the demand of university teachers) (3) improving the IT curricula to satisfy the changing needs of the industry and economy and (4) development of the university industry co-operation. This paper describes the development activities concentrating especially an the co-operation network of universities and the knowledge transfer from other countries, especially from Finland, to Estonia.