Designing an Information Technology Curriculum: The Georgia Southern University Experience

The paper describes the curriculum offered at Georgia Southern University, and shows how the various courses in the curriculum contribute to the graduate’s acquisition of the relevant skills. It pays particular attention to the inclusion of so-called second disciplines, a feature that distinguishes Georgia Southern University’s curriculum from Information Technology curricula offered elsewhere. Second disciplines are 21 credit hour programs of study that give students an in-depth exposure to an IT application area and were included in response to the complaint made by many IT organizations that they have difficulty recruiting entry-level staff with both a good grounding in IT and in the particular application area of interest to the company in question. We believe that the process that Georgia Southern University used in the design of its IT baccalaureate curriculum in general and the inclusion of second disciplines in it, in particular, will lead to graduates who are more likely to meet the human resource demands of companies with a large IT workforce.