Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Courses: How have Finnish Universities made different?

In my opinion there are excellent ICT courses in Brazil, specially in public Universities, even tough there are good ICT courses in private Universities too. In Brazil, there are deep holes among different levels of education, for example from upper secondary school to higher education. With rare exceptions, students have not been prepared to choose the career to follow and I had though it was the main point that could explain the high dropout rates in ICT courses. IFPB, campus João Pessoa, has provided to students two different ICT courses, Internet Systems Technology and Computer Network Technology, both the students are able to conclude the courses at least 3 years.

Regarding ICT courses of IFPB, teachers have been concerned to provide an updated curriculum for students and I consider IFPB has tried to supply our laboratories with good equipments, softwares and technical staff, and affordable to all students. Although the good environment teachers and students have, the dropout rates have increased year by year. The dropout rates is one of the two research questions of the VET CNPq project I've worked during my technical cooperation in Tampere University of Applied Sciences.

I've observed ICT courses of TAMK: Business Information Systems (BIS) and ICT Engineering, also I've talked to some teachers of that courses, mainly Tony Torp and Rami Lehtinen. I was really interested in seeing the courses' curriculum and learning strategies adopted. Considering everything I've seen, I could realized two main differences between TAMK courses and ours at IFPB: the first one is the organization of the 1st year of the courses, TAMK has focused on a big project involving some subjects aiming to motivate students, even though in my opinion, penalizing some computer science fundamentals (as I could see, that CS fundamentals are taught in others semesters after). The second difference, both in BIS and in ICT Engineering, the students only choose the specialization they will follow at the end of the first year, after be exposed to some introductory subjects and a big project involving all them. 

Dropout rates have decreased so much since these initiatives have been implemented. Students have had the opportunity to experiment different areas before making the important decision of choosing what they'll study until the end of the course. Students have been motivated through a methodology of learning by doing (integrated project). I realized talking to teachers that the students have carried extra skills like teamwork and learning by themselves, essencial skills expected in ICT professionals. In BIS 1st year project, the project client usually has been an institution not related to the University.