The last twenty years has seen the development of demand for a new type of computing professional, which has resulted in the emergence of the academic discipline of Information Technology (IT). Numerous colleges and universities across the country and abroad have responded by developing programs without the advantage of an existing model for guidance. Efforts to define a model curriculum for IT began at the first Conference on Information Technology curriculum (CITC-1) in December 2001, which included representatives from 15 IT programs at four-year universities across the United States. Membership in SIGITE (Special Interest Group Information Technology Education) has grown to over 400 representing many of the four-year IT programs in the United States and abroad and some of the two-year IT programs in the United States. Continued development of the curriculum and subsequent funding by the Education Board of ACM enabled the completion of a first draft of the model curriculum for IT establishing program outcomes and a body of knowledge defining the discipline. This paper presents an overview of the process followed and the results achieved.
Efforts to define IT curriculum and accreditation standards began at the first Conference on Information Technology Curriculum (CITC-1) in December 2001, which included representatives from 15 Information Technology (IT) programs at four-year schools in the United States, and representatives from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Since this conference, this work has been ongoing at CITC-2 (April 2002), CITC-3 (September 2002), and CITC-4 (October 2003), and through committee work which has progressed between these conferences. The three main thrusts of this work have been to define standards for accreditation of IT programs, to define a model curriculum for IT programs, and to distinguish IT programs from the most closely-related academic programs, such as Information Systems and Computer Science. Membership in SIGITE (Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education) of the ACM is now over 300 members and represents most 4-year IT programs and several 2-year IT programs in the United States; the outcome of these three main thrusts should therefore be of wide interest to all those in related programs or at institutions considering forming a similar program. This paper gives some of the details of the results of the work on these three thrusts.
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