A Collaborative Framework for a Cross-Institutional Assessment to Shape Future IT Professionals

摘要

There is a need for Information Technology (IT) students to develop an awareness of current IT business practice and the role of IT plays in the broader society, together with an appreciation of some of the ethical dilemmas, security challenges, and threats to privacy that the application of IT can raise. In fact, an understanding of these concepts is underlined by professional bodies through their accreditation requirements for university IT programs. Yet, students have limited professional experience and may have difficulty in relating to the challenges posed by the use of IT in the wider community; therefore it is incumbent on undergraduate programs to provide learning experiences that foster students' professional growth in these areas. The difficulty for IT educators is how to develop in their students an understanding of current IT industry practice coupled with a broader awareness of the impact of their discipline on society. A discussion on how best to address this difficulty brought academics from Victoria University and University of Ballarat together. The outcome was a proposal for a joint teaching collaboration that centered on a common assessment formative task for students enrolled in each institution's professional development units. This paper outlines the motivation and rationale for the proposal and it details the collaborative framework essential to support an across-institutional assessment task. The paper relates the framework to realize the creation of the assessment at both universities to improve students' IT professional development.