Meeting the Challenge of IS Curriculum Modernization: ATutorial on the Successful Overhaul and ContinuousImprovement of the IS Curriculum at Ohio University

摘要

The IS department in the Ohio University College of Business recently completed a comprehensive curriculum overhaul,which spanned the last 2 years. This process involved discarding most course material and starting from scratch in thedevelopment of an entirely new curriculum, which was designed to be consistent, highly integrated, more modern andreflective of the “real world”. Through a highly collaborative and cooperative effort between department instructors, studentfocus groups and our executive advisory board, this project has been a tremendous success. New courses, which meetaggressive improvement goals, have been successfully rolled out in most areas over the past five quarters.The decision to move forward with this initiative was driven by consistent concerns expressed by faculty, students and the IScurriculum advisory board regarding the following:· Lack of clarity regarding the overall goals of the program,· General inconsistencies across the curriculum,· Use of outdated course materials,· Methodologies, tools and deliverables for system development that did not reflect the “real world”.Therefore, the goal of this project was to develop an overall vision for the IS program, and to use it to drive the developmentof a curriculum in which all courses were consistent, highly integrated, more modern and reflective of actual industrydevelopment methodologies, tools and deliverables. Our preliminary research has validated the new curriculum, as we haveseen elevated course evaluations and highly positive feedback from students, employers and the executive advisory board. Itis our expectation that enrollment in the IS major will also increase significantly as a result of this project.In this tutorial, we plan to describe the details of our curriculum overhaul process, the resulting System DevelopmentLifecycle (SDLC) curriculum model and descriptions of the new courses. We will also present in detail, two of our marquiscourses: MIS 201 – Information Analysis and Design and MIS 420 - Advanced System Development, sharing course content,deliverables, sample projects and innovative ideas. Throughout this tutorial, we will offer anecdotes and contextual quotes tomake the session lively and real. Our goal in conducting this tutorial is to share our success story in the hopes that other ISdepartments will benefit from our lessons learned.