The early 1990s saw the emergence of the Internet from the environs of the technical cognoscenti into the dot-com world with an interface for the masses. Additionally, the personal computer had reached the point that essentially everyone in all enterprises had one, and used it heavily. The increased complexity and importance of computing technologies for the success of organizations and individuals led to a growing need for professionals to select, create, apply, integrate, and administer an organizational IT infrastructure. Organizations typically filled these positions using individuals with widely varying backgrounds whose educational experiences often provided poor preparation for the demands of the position. The skill sets needed for the new breed of network and system administrators were not provided by the more algorithmically and analytically oriented computer science programs of the time. Moreover, information systems programs, with the business education requirements of their accreditation bodies, were equally unwilling or unable to include the technical depth required.
In response to this new educational need, programs arose such as those from Purdue University and Pennsylvania College of Technology, which were called Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) respectively, but were something else entirely.
These programs, and others like them, had sprung up independently and spontaneously to satisfy the needs of employers for workers with skills in networks, distributed systems, and beginning in the mid-1990s, the Web. By the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000, there were at least 17 institutions around the U.S. that had or were forming programs with similar characteristics, and which were most commonly called "Information Technology." The largest of them was at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, NY, with over 600 undergraduate students, as well as a sizable master's program.19
On the national level, other factors were developing that also contributed to the emergence of the IT discipline. The Computing Sciences Accrediting Board (CSAB), which had long been the primary accrediting body for CS education, was joining with ABET, which accredits engineering and technology programs.21 Within ABET both the newly formed Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) and the Technology Accreditation Commission (TAC) had noticed the emerging IT programs, and were wondering under which commission IT would best fit.
It was in this lively environment that a group was formed that would guide IT through the period of defining its own model curriculum, its place with respect to the other computing programs already extant, and its own accreditation criteria. The Society for Information Technology Education (SITE) was formed in December 2001, with participation from 15 institutions with programs that could be considered to be IT programs. SITE later became SIGITE (a special interest group of the ACM) in the summer of 2003.
At this first meeting in December 2001 (the Conference on Information Technology Curriculum, or CITC-1), committees were formed to formulate accreditation criteria and a model curriculum; and a Delphi study was conducted to determine which topics the participants thought should be covered in an IT program.18 At this meeting, the community also started work on a succinct definition of the discipline of IT, an effort that eventually cumulated in the following definition:
"IT, as an academic discipline, is concerned with issues related to advocating for users and meeting their needs within an organizational and societal context through the selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing technologies."
Another conference was planned for the following April and the momentum continued through CITC-2 (April 2002), CITC-3 (September 2002), and CITC-4 (October 2003), which was also SIGITE 2003.
Several early papers sought to justify the existence of the discipline. One of these surveyed course offerings by discipline and tabulated emphasis by counting hours required in several areas. Several related disciplines were included in this study (see Figure 1). The courses required in each of these disciplines were grouped into seven categories: Business; electronics and signals (Electr & Signals); computing hardware (Hardware); interpersonal communications (Interpersonal Comm); networks, Web systems, and databases (Net, Web, Databases); physics, math and chemistry (Phys, Math, Chem); and Software. The data was gathered from publicly available documents (usually university catalogs) describing the requirements of each program. Twelve institutions were studied, each with at least two of the disciplines of interest.
Figure 1 shows that each of the seven disciplines studied is unique. Management Information Systems (MIS) is the only discipline with over half of the required courses in the category of business. Computer Engineering is the only discipline with over 25% of the required courses in the category of Electronics & Signals. Computer Science is the only discipline with nearly 40% of the required courses in the category of Software. Of greatest interest in this context is the fact that IT is the strongest in the Net, Web, Databases category with a strong presence also in the Software category. The key point of this figure is the IT discipline was found to be unique and there appeared to be some consensus already as to the sub-areas that made up the IT curriculum.
From the start, accreditation was important to all the participants of CITC. The accreditation committee formed at CITC-1, and began work toward formulating accreditation standards. CITC-1 included one attendee who was specifically invited because of her strong affiliation with ABET, and the desire to have those views represented at the initiation of the efforts to establish IT as an academic discipline (see the sidebar "Accreditation.").
At CITC-3, the question of which ABET commission to use was put to a plenary vote: Should IT accredit through ABET CAC, or through ABET TAC? ABET had assured us they would honor our decision, and it was ours to make; they would not force us either way. Both commissions had their proponents in the membership, and opinions were voiced openly. When the vote was taken, about three-quarters of the membership preferred to go with ABET CAC (hereafter referred to as CAC). It was also decided to make this a binding vote; all members of SITE (later SIGITE) who sought accreditation would seek it through CAC.
This decision led CAC to restructure their accreditation criteria to consist of a set of general criteria for all computing programs, augmented by three sets of discipline specific accreditation criteria for computer science, information systems and information technology. Several IT programs have since been accredited. Both the general and the IT-specific accreditation criteria may be found at: http://www.abet.org/forms.shtml#For_Computing_Programs_Only.
The effort to write the IT model curriculum started at CITC-1 with the establishment of an IT model curriculum committee. Initially, the committee consisted of 15 individuals and soon grew to a group of 24 computing educators. It became clear it would not be feasible for a group of this size to write an IT model curriculum, and so a writing committee of seven people was appointed; that committee included three of the authors of this article. Over the course of the next two years, this writing committee was responsible for producing the various drafts of the IT model curriculum, and for soliciting and receiving input from the full curriculum committee. In addition to reviewing the various drafts produced by the writing committee, many of the members of the curriculum committee were responsible for significant parts of the curriculum document.
Principles. At SIGCSE in February 2003, a birds-of-a-feather session was organized to discuss the work on accreditation and curriculum in IT. Several members of the writing committee participated in that discussion and a set of guiding principles emerged that remained constant throughout the entire process.
The committee used several inputs to drive the development of the curriculum. The first major input was the Delphi study done at CITC-1 and validated by similar studies done with other constituencies, such as the advisory boards of participating IT programs.18 The work of the accreditation committee and the evolution of the criteria in ABET were also continuously evaluated during their development. In addition, the evolving work of the Computing Curricula project (see the accompanying sidebar "Computing Curricula 2005") was a significant influence on the model curriculum. Coordination between the writing committee and the accreditation committee and the computing curricula committee was made possible because each of these other committees included some members from the writing committee. Another significant input was the ongoing research of the SIGITE community as represented by published articles and the on-going discussions in the annual conferences.
Information technology was unique among the computing disciplines accredited by ABET CAC in that it formulated accreditation criteria before it finalized a model curriculum.
Key documents referenced often throughout the development process of the IT model curriculum included:
The principle that the IT model curriculum should be a blueprint to create programs that could be accredited led to a second important source of inputs to the IT model curriculum formulation process, namely the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET. IT was unique among the computing disciplines accredited by ABET CAC in that it formulated accreditation criteria before it finalized a model curriculum. In both CS and IS, a model curriculum existed long before the formulation of accreditation criteria.
The most recent ABET CAC accreditation criteria, formulated with considerable input from SIGITE, distinguish between General Criteria and Program Criteria. The intention is that any program in computing must meet the general criteria to be accredited, while specific computing programs, such as programs in computer science, must also meet the relevant program criteria, assuming there are any. Currently, there are program specific criteria for computer science, information systems, and information technology.
CAC's general criteria require programs seeking accreditation to formulate program educational objectives, defined as statements that describe the career and professional accomplishments that the program is preparing graduates to achieve, and program outcomes, defined as statements that describe what students are expected to know and be able to do by the time of graduation. In addition, a program is required to have a documented assessment process in place to determine the extent to which its graduates meet the program educational objectives and program outcomes. The results of this assessment process must then be used to improve the program. Many of the other accreditation criteria ask institutions to show the curriculum is designed to enable students to achieve the program outcomes and that the program has sufficient resources, including faculty, institutional support, lab and library resources, and so on, to allow students to achieve the program educational objectives and program outcomes.
In many ways, program outcomes are central when it comes to accreditation. While the actual attributes of graduates included in the current version of the CAC accreditation criteria are different in format from the ones used by the IT model curriculum committee, there has been no significant change in their content.
There were two main reasons for choosing an outcomes-based approach. The first was that ABET was moving in this direction for all programs accredited. The second was that, based on current educational practice, outcomes are more useful than inputs.
The current CAC general criteria list a number of attributes that graduates of any computing program are expected to have at the time of graduation, namely:
The IT criteria specify several additional attributes that graduates from an IT program must achieve. The additional attributes in the IT criteria are:
In addition, the IT-specific accreditation criteria provide additional guidance on the curriculum by listing a number of topics that must be covered in an IT program, including the core information technologies of human computer interaction, information management, programming, networking, Web systems and technologies, information assurance and security, system administration and maintenance, system integration, and architecture. As will become evident later, the list of topics was strongly influenced by the IT model curriculum.
A third significant input into the curriculum process was the Computing Curricula Project, and in particular the CC 2001 document and later, "Computing Curricula 2005: The Overview Report" The IT community decided that the curriculum should not be organized around courses, in the way in which the model curriculum for Information Systems is primarily organized,15 but around smaller units. There was a wide variety of IT programs and it was felt this diversity was welcome, especially in an emerging discipline such as IT. Organizing the model curriculum around a set of courses could stifle innovation, so it was decided to organize the curriculum around Knowledge Units structured into Knowledge Areas. A Knowledge Area was thus a particular disciplinary subfield, and a Knowledge Unit was a thematic module within a Knowledge Area.
Knowledge units consist of a set of topics and a set of learning outcomes, divided into core outcomes and advanced outcomes. The core outcomes are those that committee members could agree that every IT student should achieve. There is no expectation that every student achieves all advanced outcomes, but there is an expectation that every graduate from an IT program achieves some of the advanced outcomes. Which advanced outcomes are covered depends on the preferred emphasis of the student and the flavor of the IT program that he or she is enrolled in (such as networking, security, Web systems, among others).
The 2008 version of the IT model curriculum has been thoroughly reviewed, has come about as a result of input from multiple institutions, with great support from the ACM, with input from the ACM, ABET, and the IEEE Computer Society.
During the period of intense work on the model curriculum from 2003 to 2005, there was a lot of evolution going on in many individual IT programs. During that evolution, faculty of the BYU IT program published several papers documenting their thinking and their changes, in the hope that the community could use this experience and thinking in their own programs.10,11,12,13 In 2002, they observed that in networking the theoretical underpinning, course outline, and even the text were the same for both the CS and IT version of this course, but the major difference was the labs were needed to provide the student outcomes.11 Over the next three years several papers were published that documented work in the community to develop IT curriculum. Of particular note was the work of Charles Reynolds and the staff at the U.S. Military Academy.2,23,? The were building on each other's work and the impact of the collaboration was significant on the evolution of the model curriculum. A consensus developed around the ideas that the focus of IT was at the integration points of the various technologies and that there were some pervasive themes that were common to almost all IT programs. These ideas became common threads in much of our work. The pervasive themes that emerged were:
In the spring of 2004 the writing committee met in Williamsport, PA, and resolved several issues, including what to call "integrative programming." Additionally, committee members were not satisfied with the organization of the security knowledge area. Immediately after the meeting, one of the writing committee (Ekstrom) participated in the IAEGC16 certificate program at Purdue sponsored by the NSA. This program strongly influenced the Information Assurance and Security (IAS) component of the model curriculum. Since IAS is a complex topic that touches every part of IT, a way was sought to organize the concepts so that it would be simple enough to introduce to a freshman and yet sufficient for advanced courses. While at the IAEGC program, Corey Schow of Idaho State University delivered a lecture in which he claimed to teach IAS in an hour. He used the cube diagram from Machonachy et al.20 and really did provide a solid overview of IAS understandable to a freshman. A version of the IAS knowledge area was written and vetted with the other participants and faculty of the IAEGC program. Thus the IAS component of the curriculum was directly derived from the work of that community.
Integrative Programming. One of the more significant insights that developed during the writing of the model curriculum resulted in the creation of the knowledge area "Integrative Programming." The writing committee kept seeing some topics that were in the Programming knowledge area, but these topics seemed to be distinct from the programming taught in CS programs. It was soon realized that what needed attention were several programming concepts which had been added to the Programming knowledge area.
When looked at more carefully, it was realized that these topics represented programming concepts unique to the IT academic discipline, and that the element they all had in common was that they dealt with integrative programmingprogramming that pulled together larger and perhaps disparate programs or code segments, permitting them to share functions, data, security features, and so forth. Scripting is an essential part of integrative programming. Once it was realized that these topics belonged together, they were grouped in a separate knowledge area and then the new knowledge area was fleshed out.
Much more transpired between the first posting of the model curriculum on the ACM Web site and its final version in November 2008, but the details of that period are of minimal importance here. The main point is the 2008 version of the IT model curriculum has been thoroughly reviewed, has come about as a result of input from multiple institutions, with great support from the ACM, with input from the ACM, ABET, and the IEEE Computer Society. It has taken its place alongside the other curricula recommendations on the ACM Web site (http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations).
The five pillars of an IT academic program are: databases, human-computer interaction, networking, programming, and Web systems.
Again, from the model curriculum:
"IT programs aim to provide IT graduates with the skills and knowledge to take on appropriate professional positions in Information Technology upon graduation and grow into leadership positions or pursue research or graduate studies in the field. Specifically, within five years of graduation a student should be able to:
The IT Body of Knowledge. Figure 5-1 on page 27 of the model curriculum details the "IT Body of Knowledge" as reproduced in Figure 2.
IT is unique among the computing disciplines in that it emerged in response to a specific educational need, rather than as a result of the emergence of a set of research questions that were not covered sufficiently by existing disciplines in the way in which, for example, cognitive science emerged as a separate discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as the field matures, the community is gradually starting to broaden its focus to include research questions as well as educational concerns (see for example, Reichgelt,22 Ekstrom et al.,13 and Cole et al.6).
Much of this is strongly influenced by the 2008 version of the 4-Year IT Curriculum volume, which provides an excellent introduction to the academic discipline of IT, along with recommendations for the content and delivery of an IT curriculum. This curriculum volume represents the best efforts of many individuals from many academic institutions and professional organizations. It increases to five the number of computing programs that have formally defined curricula, as outlined in the CC 2005 document. It has received wide exposure both nationally and internationally, and has already had a significant impact on many computing programs both in the U.S. and abroad. It should serve a useful role throughout its lifetime.
1. ABET: Computing Accreditation Criteria. (Now only available as 20092010 criteria or 20102011 criteria); http://www.abet.org/forms.shtml#For_Computing_Programs_Only
2. Alford, K. L., Carter, C. A., Ragsdale, D. J., Ressler, E. K., and Reynolds C. W. Specification and managed development of information technology curricula. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on informaotion Technology Education, Salt Lake City, UT CITC 5, October 2830 2004, ACM, New York, NY, 261266. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1029533.1029598
3. CC 2001: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Science; http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations.
4. CE 2004: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Computer Engineering; http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations.
5. Clarke, F. and Reichgelt, H. The importance of explicitly stating educational objectives in computer science curricula. SIGCSE Bulletin Inroads 35, 4 (2003), 4750.
6. Cole, C., Ekstrom, J., and Helps, R. Collecting IT Scholarship: The IT-Thesis Project. SIGITE 2009, p 127132.
7. Computing Curricula 2005: The Overview Report; http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations.
8. Denning, P. J. The Profession of IT: Who are we? Commun. ACM 44, 2 (Feb. 2001), 1519.
9. Denning, P. J. The Profession of IT: The IT schools movement. Commun. ACM 44, 8 (Aug. 2001), 1519.
10. Ekstrom, J. and Renshaw, S. A Project-Based Introductory Curriculum in Networking, WEB and Database Systems for 4-year Information Technology Programs. CITC (Sept. 2002), Rochester, NY.
11. Ekstrom, J. and Renshaw, S. Curriculum and Issues in a First Course of Computer Networking for Four-year Information Technology Programs. ASEE Session 2793, 2002.
12. Ekstrom, J. and LUNT, B. 2003. Education at the Seams: Preparing Students to Stitch Systems Together, Curriculum and Issues for 4-Year IT Programs. Purdue University CITC (Oct. 2003), West Lafayette, IN.
13. Ekstrom, J., Lunt, B., and Helps, C. Education at the seams: Preliminary evaluation of teaching integration as a key to education in Information Technology. In Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition.
14. Gillies, J., and Cailliau, R. 2000. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press, NY.
15. Gorgonne, J. T., Davis, G. B., Valacich, J. S., Topi, H., Feinstein, D. L., and Longnecker, H. E, Jr. IS 2002: Model Curriculum and Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems, (2003); http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations
16. Information Assurance Education Graduate Certificate (IAEGC), 2005. Validated Oct. 2008; http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/iae
17. IS 2002: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems; http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations.
18. Lunt, B. M., Ekstrom, J. J., Lawson, E. A., Kamali, R., Miller, J., and Gorka, H. R. Defining the IT Curriculum: The Results of the Past 2 1/2 Years; In Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Education and Research (Olomouc, Czech Republic, June 2730, 2004).
19. Lutz, P. 2007. Information Technology: History, Development, Trends (2007); http://www.nssa.rit.edu/~phl/TacomaSlides.ppt
20. Machonachy, V., Sschou, C., Ragsdale, D., and Welch, D. A model for information assurance: An integrated approach. In Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Workshop on Information Assurance and Security, (U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, June 56 2001).
21. Martin, K. 2001. CSAB, Inc. President's Message; http://www.csab.org/pdf/President_s%20Message%202001.pdf
22. Reichgelt, H., and Yaverbaum, G. Accountability and accreditation: Putting Information Systems accreditation into perspective. Commun. AIS 21 (2007), 416428.
23. Reynolds, C. W. Engineering the information technology curriculum with pervasive themes. In Proceedings of the 7th Conference on information Technology Education, (Minneapolis, MN, Oct. 1921 2006). ACM, NY, 141148; http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1168812.1168847
24. SE 2004: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Software Engineering; http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations.
25. Stoll, C. The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage. Doubleday, NY, 1989.
Figure 1. A comparison of programs in computing (derived from Lunt et al.
Figure 2. The IT Body of Knowledge with core topics italicized.
From the first meeting in Provo, the IT education community has been interested in pursuing accreditation for its programs. It is therefore not surprising that there has been a constant interplay between efforts to formulate an IT model curriculum and to formulate accreditation standards. In order to understand this interplay, some background on accreditation is needed.
Accreditation is essentially a quality assurance mechanism for higher education. Accreditation assures that a program or school meets a set of independently specified quality criteria.
There are two types of accreditation in the U.S., namely institutional or regional accreditation and specialized accreditation. Institutional or regional accreditation applies to the institution as a whole. An example of a regional institutional accreditation organization is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS, http://www.sacs.org/). Specialized accreditation, on the other hand, applies to subunits in academic institutions. Some specialized accreditation agencies, such as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, http://www.aacsb.edu/) accredit certain units within a college and, hence by implication, all programs offered in that unit; other accreditation agencies accredit specific programs.
The specialized accreditation agency most relevant to computing is ABET Inc. ABET accredits programs in applied science, computing, engineering and engineering technology. It works through four commissions (see the accompanying figure).
Structure of ABET for Computing Programs
ABET formulates accreditation criteria with the help of professional societies and after a long and deliberative process. For most accreditation criteria, ABET has a single lead society which is, among other things, responsible for suggesting accreditation criteria, although there may be cooperating societies. For example, the lead society for Civil Engineering is the American Society of Civil Engineers.
CAC is an exception in that it has a single lead society (CSAB) for all its programs. CSAB is itself an umbrella organization for the ACM (http://www.acm.org/), the Association for Information Systems (AIS, http://home.aisnet.org/) and the IEE Computer Society (IEE-CS, http://www.computer.org). CSAB is also the lead society for software engineering, although programs in software engineering are accredited by ABET EAC.
The last 10 years or so have seen a significant shift in the way in which accreditation criteria are formulated. Initially, accreditation criteria were input-based. As a result, accredited programs tended to be very similar and there were few programs that were adapted to the specific needs of their constituencies.
Most accreditation agencies therefore moved to outcomes-based accreditation criteria. Programs are now expected to formulate, after consultation with their constituencies, a set of program educational objectives, describing the career and professional accomplishments they want to prepare their graduates for. The program derives from these a set of program outcomes, which are descriptions of the skills that graduates must have as they graduate from the program and that prepare them to achieve the program educational objectives. The program then designs a curriculum that allows students to acquire the program outcomes. Programs must also establish a systematic process to assess to what extent graduates achieve the program educational objectives and program outcomes, and to use that data to improve the program. For more details, see Reichgelt and Yaverbaum.22
The shift to outcomes-based accreditation criteria within ABET took place in the late 1990s and was led by the engineering community. In CAC the change was led by IT. There were three reasons for this.
First, the early meetings of the IT education community were attended by representatives from ABET and faculty members who had been active in ABET TAC. Since ABET had decided it wanted to move away from input-based accreditation criteria, there were subtle hints that ABET would prefer outcomes-based accreditation criteria.
Second, a number of the individuals who were involved in the formulation of IT accreditation criteria were convinced of the superiority of outcomes-based approaches. For example, one of the co-authors of this article co-wrote a paper in the late 1990s extolling the virtues of using program outcomes in curriculum design, although the paper did not appear in print until much later.5 One of the advantages of an outcomes-based approach to curriculum development is that it provides a better basis on which to resolve differences of opinion about what ought to be included in a degree program.
The third reason the IT education community adopted an outcomes-based approach was more pragmatic. Although there was some level of agreement on what should be included in an IT program, there were significant disagreements as well, and the feeling was it would be extremely difficult to reach agreement on an input-based set of accreditation criteria. For example, early on there was an ongoing debate on the need to have some faculty members with a Ph.D. By moving away from an input-based approach to accreditation, the community felt it could essentially avoid such issues from stopping us achieve our goal of getting to a set of accreditation criteria.
Structure of ABET for computing programs.
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