Impact of a Cross-Institutional Assessment Designed to Shape Future IT Professionals

Introduction Australian national threshold learning outcomes for the Information Technology (IT) discipline were established after extensive consultation with academics, industry professionals, accreditation bodies, students, and graduates; the resulting Engineering and ICT Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement was published in December 2010 (Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2010). The five learning outcome areas identified are (1) problem-solving and design, (2) abstraction and modeling, (3) needs, context and systems, (4) coordination and communication, and (5) self-management, and they are to be used by Australian academics to align their undergraduate IT curricula. Typically, IT curricula cover the first two learning outcomes as they focus on the large repertoire of technical skills needed by graduates to cope in an increasingly connected world. The greater challenge for educators is to realistically tackle the remaining three learning outcomes, in that, it is more difficult to ensure opportunities for students to acquire and develop the necessary teamwork, leadership, and people skills together with an appreciation of the social, cultural, legislative, environmental, and business contexts of the systems that they build (Aasheim, Li, & Williams, 2009; Zhang, 2012). Some time ago, academics from Victoria University and Federation University came together to discuss this challenge and formulate a curriculum response that resulted in an across-institutional teaching collaboration. There were two main drives for the teaching collaboration, one being the need to broaden students' understanding of current professional IT business practices with an appreciation of the set of personal skills and technical competencies needed in their future careers (Kamoun & Selim, 2007). The second drive was the desire to ensure quality assurance in our respective undergraduate IT programs. A suitable professional development unit at each institution was selected to enable students to practice professional skills, including soft skills, technical competencies, team work, and focus on ethical and societal issues in IT. The Cross-institutional Assessment Academics from both institutions recognized the power of assessment to motivate students and drive learning outcomes, particularly formative assessments that encourage students to learn through the process of doing (Black & William, 2009; Boud & Falchikov, 2007; William & Thompson, 2007). A formative assessment task drawing upon common topics in the two professional development units was coauthored by the teaching academics at both institutions. The task was contextualized around real-life IT business practice and professional behaviors, particularly in response to ethical dilemmas, security challenges, and threats to privacy. Since, students have few opportunities to network with IT practitioners, the assessment incorporated a 'novice meets expert' experience where teams of students would interview an IT professional with a leadership role. Importantly, opportunities to improve students' interpersonal and communication skills and self-management capabilities were further extended through the added dimension of working with students from a partner institution. The rationale for the collaboration and assessment details are published in Venables, Tan, & Pradhan (2014). The project commenced with an extensive review of the research literature to uncover similar efforts within IT education, yet to the best of our knowledge the use of a common assessment task across two institutions is entirely novel. The first task for students completing the cross-institutional assessment was to assign themselves to a team of four members, comprising two students from each institution. Once team memberships were decided, introductions needed to be made between group members; this posed a physical challenge as the two participating universities are some 100 kilometers apart. …