Transforming IT education: promoting a culture of excellence
About this ebook
now an obvious observation that much of the world depends on information
technology. Our infrastructure relies on
IT: our buildings, finance systems, roads, airplanes, cars, televisions,
washing machines and bread makers; as does much of what we do: our banking, learning and communicating. Almost everyone today uses information
technology, but few know how it works, and very few indeed understand the
mysteries of how to build new systems.
This imbalance between ‘users’ and ‘knowers’ grows worse every
year. With the ‘dot com collapse’, the
number of students studying computers, and information technology more
generally, has been shrinking steadily.
In the long run, this trend is not likely to be a good thing, either in Australia
or elsewhere.
What can we
do about this? IT courses worldwide report falling enrolments and high
attrition. The glamour of computing –
seemingly effortless graphics and animations, and the management of massive computations
and data sets – is at odds with the reality of how difficult it can be to coax
computers into exhibiting these advanced capabilities; and many students find
the transition from the dream to reality too difficult to master.
One
possibility is to reconceptualize both what and how we teach, making IT more
attractive to students without sacrificing the rigour and depth needed to
produce graduates capable of life-long learning against the backdrop of rapidly
evolving technologies. The Faculty of
Information Technology at QUT has long sought to develop curricula and
pedagogies that make this possible. The
results of this search show in innovative curricula, real-world engagement, and
a dominant position in our local market for IT education.
QUT’s
strategic plan, the ‘QUT Blueprint’*, exhorts the University to be bold,
experiment, and engage with the real world in order to ensure we remain
relevant and attuned to the needs of both our graduates and the industries that
will employ them. The contents of this
book report on a significant part of our response to this challenge.
I’m
honoured to be able to write this preface only a year after I joined QUT; the work herein is a credit to my two
predecessors as Deans of the Faculty, Professors Dennis Longley and John Gough,
and to all the staff of the Faculty, both academic and professional, and
current and past. Hopefully it will also
help to inspire a new generation of staff and students.
To you, the
reader, this book is best thought of as a snapshot of a long quest to discover
the secrets of how best to approach the moving feast that is IT education. It
will be of interest to those looking to develop new curricula of their own, or
benchmark their own journeys of discovery.
We should never imagine that we have all the answers; indeed, it’s our
hope that readers will learn from, and improve on, what we have achieved, and
share their insights with us in return, so that the co-evolution of ICT
teaching around the world can be facilitated.
