Information Technology Bachelor Research Articles

Comparing Three Theories of the Gender Gap in Information Technology Careers: The Role of Salience Differences

The information technology (IT) field faces a skills shortage. Only 17% of a projected 3.5 million computing job openings are expected to be filled by 2026 (National Association for Women & Information Technology, 2018). Yet the number of women pursuing IT careers continues to decrease—only 19% of IT bachelor’s degrees in 2016 were awarded to women compared to 57% of bachelor’s degrees overall. We compared three theories that could explain this gender gap in the pursuit of IT careers: expectancy-value theory, role congruity theory, and field-specific ability beliefs theory. We find that women and men are similar in their levels of important factors related to career interest, but that two of these factors—technical learning self-efficacy and agentic goals—have increased salience for women. This suggests that some of the gender gap in the IT field could be addressed by placing more focus on developing technical learning self-efficacy in both men and women. While this could help both women and men, it would likely have an outsized effect on the IT career pursuit of women.

Co-creation of value in higher education: using social network marketing in the recruitment of students

A social network recruitment campaign was prepared where applicants for information technology bachelor studies at a Norwegian university college were invited to join a Facebook group related to the subject of interest. Each Facebook group was assigned a contact person who received training to facilitate activities and in answering questions from the applicants. Analysis of the dialogues on the Facebook groups indicates value creation between the applicant and the university college, and between applicants. Furthermore, results from the campaign showed that the conversion rate for applicants who apply for a Facebook group was 88.8 per cent, which is significant higher than for those who did not apply for a Facebook group (43.3 per cent). We will argue that social network marketing in higher education gives a great opportunity to replace the passive view of customers with an active view in which applicants are invited to use their own initiatives rather than simply react to predetermined marketing activities.

Identifying and evaluating information technology bachelor's degree programs

This paper describes the process for identifying and evaluating Information Technology (IT) bachelor’s programs in the United States, in an effort to answer the question, how many IT bachelor’s programs are there in the US? Due to widespread variation in the names of academic degree programs, one cannot simply count those named Information Technology. At SIGITE 2011, a framework was presented for identifying IT programs and for evaluating their compliance to an accepted standard. This framework has been applied throughout this research. We first compiled a list of prospective IT programs to research. Each university on the list was researched by looking at their university webpage in search of a list of computing majors listed at that university. If, at a glance, these program’s required courses look similar to those required in an IT program, the program was evaluated and given a numerical score compliance factor, as compared to the standard, no matter the name of the major. This compliance factor is calculated using the assessment form that is included in this document. The results of this analysis are presented. General Terms Computing Programs, Information Technology

ICT Entrepreneurship Model: A New Approach for Information Technology Bachelor Education

This article describes experiences from developing and utilizing team learning and entrepreneurship environment (TLE) in information technology bachelor education in a Finnish University of Applied Sciences. In this study eleven ICT students (called teampreneurs) and their studying during the first year was observed. Our aim was to identify the main challenges of this first team. We used a mixed method approach in our study together with theme-based interviews and direct and participative observation as data collection methods. According to our findings the main challenge was difficulties to understand new team learning and teampreneurship principles. Teampreneurs were used to normal school learning where learning contents and goals are predefined. There were also misunderstandings and ambiguous expectations concerning both the coach's and the teampreneur's roles and responsibilities. We suggest that all these challenges are somehow related to overcoming fear. Teampreneurs were afraid of the nnew way of learning and its features. The rest of the article discusses the reasons for the fear and how to overcome it. We also outline the topics for further research.

An IT Bachelor Degree Using Modern Technologies to Illustrate Core Concepts and Principles and Building Generic Skills

Information Technology (IT) changes very quickly and influences business, industry and the public in an enormous manner. Outsourcing of IT jobs to cheaper overseas labor and globalization of IT companies become a common practice. Graduates of IT university courses must be well prepared to address the needs and expectations of business, industry and every day life. Many factors in an Information Technology curriculum influence graduates' professional preparation and image. The most important of them is to reflect technology change, the current state of knowledge of computing, business and industry demands and students' expectations. The aim of our project was to develop a new Bachelor of IT curriculum that satisfies these requirements. In this report we concentrate our attention on two critical aspects of IT curriculum content, the modern technologies to be used to illustrate basic concepts and principles of computing, and the generic skills that each graduate is expected to acquire to get a job in Australia.