Constructing a New College IT Curriculum?

slonkak asks: "For extra credit in my Management & Information Systems we were asked to redevelop the IT curriculum. Interning at a government organization for the past 5 years, I have a good idea of what I'd like to know graduating from college. Here are the two tracks I came up with. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve this curriculum? I would like more experience members of the Slashdot community to give their input on what they would like to see new hires have a good understanding of." Yes, this one may sound like Slashdot-Do-My-Homework, but the underlying question is still worthwhile. For you IT Managers out there, what do you expect someone with a college degree to know? For you prospective CS Students who might be reading, what would you like to learn while obtaining that degree?

Comments

Theory

[Ouroboro]

I can't speak to your network engineering curriculum, but the curriculum for developer is woefully lacking in any theory. What you have designed here is a curriculum that will produce individuals that are capable of producing software that conforms to a specification, but have not been prepared to create a specification.

There needs to be courses in data structures, algorithm analysis and operating system theory. I would concern myself less with teaching someone how to be a Java programmer, or a .net programmer, and more with what skills are required to be a good X programmer, where X is whatever language/technology that he or she is presented with. This means that the curriculum and your student aren't obsolete when there is a technology du jour.

I will say that the one thing that the CS curriculum that I was involved in didn't prepare me effectively for was, documentation. I think that it would have been nice to have been required to produce more in the way documentation for the projects that I was involved in.

Re:CS, or IT?

[Austin Milbarge]

I totally agree with you. I taught at two colleges in New York and let me tell you, who ever makes up these curriculums are really doing the students a disservice. I found it very frustrating because these students were pushed along with high level concepts and buzz words. Dont get me wrong. Technologies like COM, ActiveX, .NET, JNI, J2EE, XML, JavaScript, ASP, Applets, CGI, VRML, etc, etc, etc... are all useful and great. But they come and go almost everyday! Whereas basic concepts like pointers, stack frames, dynamic memory allocation, linked lists, hash tables, trees, file mapping and virtual memory are the foundation of all computing and are ingnored or barely mentioned in schools anymore.

Why? Because learning this stuff is downright difficult. But this is where the science is. Most colleges and certification courses who promise big $$$ to it's students who graudate, don't have the time and resources to teach students the basic building blocks, which is why I feel we (America) are losing our grip in IT on a global scale.

Another piece of the spoiled pie is that these students are taught about technology mostly through Microsoft products and Microsoft's marketing and never understand how makefiles or compiler switches work. I can't begin to tell you how many companies I've worked for that hire button clickers and mouse draggers only to find out they are paying BIG $$$ for a guy who can barely solve a problem without looking through his Microsoft technet CD or worse yet, re-installing Windows! We really need to get back to the basics and teach computer science and NOT some company's marketing campaign.