Analytics Prevalent Undergraduate IT Program

Abstract

As we enter age of information, computational resources have become relatively inexpensive and seemingly limitless in their capabilities. Consequently, the field of data science has emerged as one of the key areas in industry among engineers, scientists, and IT professionals alike. In this paper, we derive a Data Analytics Body of Knowledge (DA-BoK) from the existing Data Science BoK (DS-BoK) as a means to provide data analytics content throughout the curriculum of an institution's undergraduate IT degree programs. A series of four Knowledge Areas are subdivided into Knowledge Units that can be introduced into existing IT courses through four embedding types, including lectures by example, labs, case studies, and projects. A case study is presented using our three IT programs as examples of how this content can be introduced at three levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (i.e. vocabulary, comprehension, application) through each of the embedding types. Finally, insights and guidance are provided on how to improve the proposed data analytics embedded IT curriculum in order to meet the demands of the modern data analytics pipeline in industry.