Curriculum design for a PhD specialization in IT education

More and more colleges and universities are requiring Information Technology (IT) educators to hold a PhD degree as part of their credentials. One driver for this change is the work of the ACM’s Special Interest Group for IT Education (SIGITE) toward building a professional accreditation path for IT programs through the oversight of ABET. A second driver for this change includes regional accreditation organizations, like the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools [3] and the Higher Learner Commission [2], both of which strongly suggest that graduate school faculty have an earned doctorate in the discipline taught. This paper provides an overview of a new degree program at Capella University: PhD in IT with a Specialization in IT Education. The core courses include research methods courses as well as courses which guide learners through the comprehensive examination and dissertation. IT courses cover topics including IT technical foundations, IT planning and delivery, IT strategies, IT management, and advanced topics in IT. Learners also can take additional courses from an array of graduate IT courses offered as electives. A number of innovative approaches were used in the design of the curriculum for this specialization. Recognizing that the IT Education specialty is a cross-disciplinary concentration, the curriculum leverages relevant courses being offered in the School of Education at Capella. Three new courses are specially designed to prepare learners to meet the challenges that they have to face as IT educators: • A first course to provide orientation with emphasis on critical thinking, scholarly writing, and theory formulation, • A course on IT curriculum standards and research literature in IT education, and • A course for hands-on teaching practice. Many of these specialty courses are based on current research literature to ensure content relevancy in the fast moving field of IT. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGITE’07, October 18–20, 2007, Destin, Florida, USA. Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-920-3/07/0010...$5.00. Before implementation, the proposed courses and competencies were first validated internally by a panel of experienced IT educators and later externally in a session at the SIGITE Conference 2006. The paper concludes by summarizing the feedback from students in the first course and reflecting on lessons learned in launching this new degree program.