ICT FOR SPORT PROFESSIONALS. FROM UNIVERSITY CURRICULA TO SPORT TRAINING AND BACK

Abstract

ICT (information and communications technology) is part of nowadays professional sport training. And this happens to an open range: from educational software for sport to e-games used in kinesitherapy, from mobile devices and specific mobile applications for sport training to simulators, and passing through e-learning. As a direct consequence, the university program studies in physical education, sport training and kinesitherapy have to teach the future sport professionals more or less elementary notions in ICT. In order to distinguish what is important in sport from technology information, one has to consider several questions: what a sport student is supposed to know about information technology, which kind of ICT are used in sport, what are the trends both in ICT and in sport training. In this paper we are interested to identify good practice for conceiving and upgrading ICT curricula for sport professionals. To answer the above questions, we investigate different directions. We survey the ICT related courses at important universities and physical education faculties from all over the world: at which level of study are they tough, what is their content, what software and devices are involved. We are also concerned about the trends in both computer science and sport training, and here the keywords are mobility and precision. Nowadays research in sport cannot be figured out without the benefit of computers. On one hand in doctoral studies, on the other hand for training national or Olympic teams, sport professionals collaborate with computer scientist, electronic engineers, and other type of scientists. To identify the place of ICT in their work, we browsed the main journals and conferences publishing their results. We can conclude that ICT is part of the famous university curricula for sport professionals, the content depends on the level of study and, at least at post-graduate level, the courses are adapted to the particular sport specialization. Another conclusion points out the necessary collaboration between sport and computer science professionals, in order to continuously adapt the curricula and the research to both sport performance and new technologies.