Education At The Seams: Preliminary Evaluation Of Teaching Integration As A Key To Education In Information Technology

Information Technology (IT) is widely considered to be an integrative discipline. Many four-year IT programs accept programming, networking, web systems, databases and human-computer interaction as core topics in IT. Active discussion continues as to the best way to teach and sequence these topics. We have proposed and begun to implement a curriculum that reflects a change in orientation from focusing on the technologies to focusing on the interfaces between technologies. We believe that this approach is fundamental to IT as an academic discipline. Students receive a broad introduction to computer and communication technologies combined with an in-depth exploration of the interactions between key technologies. This enables IT students to stitch systems together with understandable, manageable and deployable seams. We report on early results of applying this curricular approach within BYU’s four-year IT program. Introduction There is an emerging consensus among Information Technology programs that the core of an IT curriculum consists of Programming, Database, Web Technologies, Networking and Human Computer Interfacing [1]. The initial curriculum for Information Technology at BYU took the approach of including topics from Electronics Engineering Technology, Computer Science and Computer Engineering in a traditional topic-oriented approach. Other IT programs have been following a similar track [1]. During the last three years we have observed several problems in attempting to implement IT courses by tailoring courses from related disciplines to the requirements of an IT curriculum. We reported on these experiences in our networking course development at ASEE 2002[2]. We discussed similar issues for web systems and database courses at CITC III[3] and CIEC 2003[4]. At CITC IV[5] we proposed focusing on the interfaces between technologies as an overriding philosophy that should guide Information Technology curriculum design in relation to sister disciplines. This paper is a follow-up to the CITC IV work that reports on the first year of implementing the curriculum changes that were proposed. In addition, we discuss the issues that have arisen and additional changes that we are implementing to address them. Initially we thought of IT as a “breadth” rather than “depth” coverage of topics from Computer Engineering, Computer Science, with some ideas from other disciplines and an applications orientation. However, we have come to understand that IT students require depth, but not depth on how to implement technology components. IT students require deep knowledge of the interfaces between technologies. This insight has significant P ge 996.1 Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education 2 implications for IT curriculum. Students require a working knowledge of the technologies that are to be integrated, plus deep understanding of the interactions between the technologies involved. This deep understanding of the intricacies of integration should be a major focus of IT as a discipline. Initially, IT students need a broad introduction to computer and communication technologies followed by in-depth treatment of their interactions. This requirement for a broad introduction has necessitated reorganization of the original BYU curriculum to include overview courses, one at the freshman and one and the sophomore level. These courses provide context and motivation for the entire curriculum. One of their primary goals is to provide a hands-on introduction to IT that creates a map of the concepts central to IT and where in the curriculum the student can expect to learn the details. There is an additional benefit that students find no surprises when they reach the upper division core. They have already been introduced to the concepts and expectations have been set correctly. In this paper we first summarize the current status of IT curriculum development and accreditation efforts; we then present a brief history of the BYU experience in creating an IT program. Next we present the conceptual framework that motivated the curriculum changes and show how this conceptual orientation helps us understand several of the problems we observed. We then discuss the experience of the last year as we implemented the curriculum changes. In conclusion we discuss the implications of the ideas presented along with outstanding issues. We freely admit that this work is preliminary and that much work remains to be done. Results can only be preliminary when a course has been taught only once. We present these ideas with the hope that it will help other emerging IT programs analyze the issues they are facing and also to elicit feedback from the academy. Status of IT Curriculum and Accreditation IT has emerged as a discipline separate from Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Information Science. April of 2002 saw the second Conference on Information Technology Curriculum (CITC-2), attended by representatives of 35 universities with 4-year programs in Information Technology (IT), as well as representatives of related professional societies (IEEE Computer Society; ACSE) and accreditation (the Technology Accreditation Commission and the Computer Accreditation Commission of ABET, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology). The CITC-2 conference gave birth to SITE, the Society for Information Technology Education, which in 2003 was organized as a special-interest group (SIG) of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and is known as SIGITE. Membership in SIGITE comes from over 30 institutions of higher education and from professional and accreditation bodies. Membership in SIGITE is open to all interested parties; efforts are being made to invite all who would be interested. The main efforts of SITE have been to define the academic discipline of IT, which has involved work on IT curriculum and IT accreditation. Efforts to this point have resulted in draft documents defining IT curriculum and outlining the requirements for IT accreditation. In the most recent CITC (October 2003), both documents were discussed. The accreditation document was approved with minor changes.[6] The curriculum P ge 996.2 Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education 3 document was approved and a writing committee was formed to write the formal document defining IT curriculum. The model for this document is the CS volume of the CC2001 document. [7] Most SIGITE members have indicated close agreement with both documents; only relatively minor changes have recently been made. Additionally, most SIGITE members have indicated that their academic institution fully intends to seek accreditation when it becomes available. In summary, the strong national movement to define the 4-year academic discipline of Information Technology, has made significant progress. SIGITE members have published several papers, given presentations at national conferences, and participated on national panels to publicize the efforts. [8] Additionally, a current report on the curriculum and accreditation progress is being presented in a paper at this conference. [1] Creating a Curriculum: an Evolving Consensus The Information Technology program at BYU began officially in fall 2001 with a faculty consisting of: 1. Two Electronics Engineering Technology professors that were instrumental in the evolution of the existing EET program at BYU into an IT program, 2. One Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. newly arrived from the aerospace industry. 3. One computer scientist instructor who had done part time teaching and had been part of the department for 1 year with several years in system development in health care. 4. One computer science Ph.D. with recent executive management responsibilities in network hardware and service provider businesses. 5. One former department chair of the technical education program for secondary schools. This is very diverse group of people, each of whom joined the department because they thought that the existing computer programs at BYU did not prepare students for the practical aspects of system delivery to customers. We are evenly divided between longterm academics and recent retreads from industry. However, the academics have also each had significant industrial experience which provided the motivation for them to accept positions in the new IT program. As we worked on the course descriptions, each of us had pet topics that could be justified as valid in Information Technology, but that didn’t fit in the time available and/or weren’t “core” to the discipline. Our Ph.D. computer scientist loves to teach compiler theory and implementation, but it didn’t really appear to fit at all. The EET professors wanted to keep a lot more of the electronics topics than one 4-year degree allowed. In conjunction with our Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) we settled on the topics that we thought belonged in an IT program. We repeated the exercise with the participants in CITC I and received similar results to those we obtained with our IAB and faculty[1]. We agreed on the topics, but not on relative importance of some of them. We also found many issues with sequencing of the topics that caused redundancy and/or a lack of prerequisite knowledge that became problematic as we taught the courses we had designed. P ge 996.3 Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education 4 As we taught the original curriculum envisioned with the junior core treated in typical “stovepipe” fashion, we encountered the problem of students with insufficient background to understand the basic functioning of a web server and its relationship to the browser. This was the first ma