The ISTE Seal of Alignment shows that ICDL has been independently reviewed by ISTE and was found to be aligned with the ISTE Standards. ICDL received the Seal of Alignment in May 2017.
ISTE is a membership organisation that is committed to educational technology. Based in the United States, but active around the world, it maintains the ISTE Standards to provide a framework that helps educators transform learning with technology. Where learning resources and programmes are judged to be aligned with the ISTE Standards, they can be recognised with the ISTE Seal of Alignment.
ICDL addresses all the elements of the Readiness level of the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students, and is one of only two organisations to do so.
The American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT®) has evaluated and recommended college credit for five of ICDL Foundation’s modules. Founded in 1918, ACE is the major coordinating body for all the United States’ higher education institutions, representing more than 1,600 college and university presidents and more than 200 related associations nationwide. It provides leadership on key higher education issues and influences public policy through advocacy.
For more than 30 years, colleges and universities have trusted ACE CREDIT to provide reliable course equivalency information to facilitate their decisions to award academic credit. For more information, visit the ACE CREDIT website at www.acenet.edu/credit.
ACE CREDIT connects workplace learning with colleges and universities by helping adults gain access to academic credit at colleges and universities for formal courses and examinations taken in the workplace or other settings outside traditional higher education.
In order to understand what the key elements of digital competence are and how to assess it, the European Commission developed DigComp. The framework defines digital competence in a structured way, with 21 individual competences over 8 different competence levels. ICDL is compatible with DigComp, with ICDL modules covering all of the 5 DigComp ‘competence areas’.
Find out more about how DigComp works
A detailed mapping of ICDL to DigComp was carried out in Poland, resulting in the initiative being featured in the EU’s Joint Research Centre DigComp Guidelines as an implementation example. ICDL is the only truly international digital skills certification to be featured in this way.
A UNESCO report used DigComp to assess a range of digital competence tools. For each tool, it compared the learning outcomes against the 21 DigComp competence areas. Of all the tools assessed, ICDL had the highest number of learning outcomes mapped to DigComp.
Qualifications frameworks, like the European Qualifications Framework, make it easy to compare qualifications and certifications from different countries with each other. International qualifications, such as ICDL, can be mapped to National Qualification Frameworks (NQFs) and, in this way, become officially recognised in different countries in Europe and worldwide. The ICDL programme has been mapped to NQFs in a number of countries.
United Kingdom
ICDL is mapped to the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF), which replaced the Qualifications & Credit Framework and the National Qualifications Framework in October 2015.
Singapore
Since 2011, the ICDL programme has been mapped to the Workforce Skills Qualification (WSQ) Employability Skills ICT Framework.
Australia
ICDL is mapped to the Australian Qualifications Framework and the Queensland Certificate of Education. The intended target audience is vocational education.
Malta
ICDL has been mapped to the Malta Qualifications Framework since 2010. The mapping was updated in 2013 to reflect ‘New ECDL’.
Vietnam
ICDL has been recognised as a qualified IT standard in Vietnam since November 2015 under Circular 03/2014/BTTTT of the Ministry of Information and Communication.
