Defining the IT Curriculum: The Results of the Past 3 Years

Abstract

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.