Search

This small scale study aims to analyze the question papers of Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in the subject of computer science with reference to item analysis and Bloom's taxonomy. Data were collected from 100 students of Grade 9th and 10th from the schools of Lahore city using convenient sampling technique. Data collected on the papers developed by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education for the year of 2015 and 2016. Item analyses were performed using Conquest software. Findings of the study shows that in the question papers conducted by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education the majority questions were measuring the student abilities of knowledge and comprehension and only few questions were given to measure the student abilities to analyze, synthesize and evaluate, and this can be very helpful for the policy makers. Result of item analysis shows that many questions were not in the acceptable range of item difficulty and item discrimination. Items in the question papers were either too easy or too difficult. Findings revealed that the papers conducted and administered by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education were not up to the mark, with reference to Bloom's taxonomy. The researcher recommended to train the assessment committee/panel developing the items.

Faculty in the information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) fields are faced with the challenge to keep their curriculum relevant and current. What was taught two years ago will often be outdated and faculty must constantly update their curriculum on which courses should be taught as well as what should be taught within a particular course. This research continues a fifteen-year effort to help understand employer needs in terms of the skills they desire new hires to possess upon employment. This is the sixth version of this employer survey. The survey continues to report the responses of over 500 IS/IT professionals and was expanded to ask additional questions related to salary information. In addition, based on feedback from open-ended questions in a prior survey, new categories were added to the survey. Several key results and changes from prior surveys include that VR/AR (virtual reality/augmented reality) platforms showed the highest anticipated growth rate for all operating platforms in the next two years, analytics tools such as Apache Spark showed high growth rate, and JavaScript maintained the first position for programming languages.

As industry embraces the agile methodology for application development, universities are shifting their curricula to teach agile principles along with traditional waterfall concepts. This paper describes a simulation game offered to students in a first-year computing concepts course to introduce both models of application development. Students work in development teams to design, build, and test paper airplanes following both waterfall and agile principles to experience the roles, processes, and challenges of each. Participants track their team's progress throughout the activity, so they can draw conclusions about the benefits and challenges of each approach. Survey results indicate that students learned the various roles and approaches of both methods through this experience.

Given the ubiquity of interfaces on computing devices, it is essential for future Information Systems (IS) professionals to understand the ramifications of good user interface (UI) design. This article provides instructions on how to efficiently and effectively teach IS students about "fit," a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) concept, through a paper prototyping activity. Although easy to explain, the concept of "fit" can be difficult to understand without repeated practice. Practically, designing "fit" into UIs can be cost-prohibitive because working prototypes are often beyond students' technical skillset. Accordingly, based on principles of active learning, we show how to use paper prototyping to demonstrate "fit" in a hands-on class exercise. We provide detailed step-by-step instructions to plan, setup, and present the exercise to guide students through the process of "fit" in UI design. As a result of this activity, students are better able to employ both theoretical and practical applications of "fit" in UI design and implementation. This exercise is applicable in any course that includes UI design, such as principles of HCI, systems analysis and design, software engineering, and project management.

Changes to degree programs in Information Systems are often attributed to quickly-evolving technology and the subsequent changing needs of the employers who hire IS graduates. In this paper, we explore other social and economic factors that were the inspiration for curriculum changes by assigning them to one of four eras in the IS timeline. Using enrollment figures and archival data, we identify both legitimate reasons and misconceptions that led to fluctuating programming requirements, the rise and fall of trendy courses, and the wholesale elimination of programs and faculty positions. We conclude the paper by using our findings to speculate what the future of IS education could look like and how degree programs should prepare for the next era of IS academia.

This article is a written version of the remarks delivered in a keynote address given at the 2018 joint conference of EDSIGCON and CONISAR. The article examines the problem of the gap between information systems education and information systems research. I cover what the problem looks like, three causes of the gap, three ways to bridge the gap, and three long-term strategies.

This paper describes James Madison University's undergraduate major in Computer Information Systems as an example of a high-quality Information Systems (IS) program and discusses our planned evolution in the context of the rapid changes of technological, business, and social factors. We have determined what we consider to be five essential ingredients of what makes JMU's program a high-quality IS major. These are: (1) building an integrated, rigorous curriculum with a strong technical foundation; (2) developing a vibrant community of faculty, students, alumni, employers, and community service organizations; (3) respecting and supporting pedagogical scholarship; (4) committing to continuous improvement and assessment; and (5) accreditation. We believe these ingredients will continue to be highly relevant as the IS discipline moves forward, but also that curriculum content will need to adjust to meet changing demand. We discuss the increasing relevance of topics such as analytics, security, and the cloud to the IS curriculum and their implications for pedagogy, accreditation, and scholarship. We hope that sharing JMU's experience, insights, and future directions will be useful to JISE's readership.

This paper presents student projects analyzing or using blockchain technologies, created by students enrolled in courses dedicated to teaching blockchain, at two different universities during the 2018- 2019 academic year. Students explored perceptions related to storing private healthcare information on a blockchain, managing the security of Internet of Things devices, maintaining public governmental records, and creating smart contracts. The course designs, which were centered around project-based learning, include self-regulated learning and peer feedback as ways to improve student learning. Students either wrote a research paper or worked in teams on a programming project to build and deploy a blockchain-based application using Solidity, a programming language for writing smart contracts on various blockchain platforms. For select student papers, this case study describes research methods and outcomes and how students worked together or made use of peer feedback to improve upon drafts of research questions and abstracts. For a development project in Solidity, this study presents the issues at hand along with interview results that guided the implementation. Teams shared lessons learned with other teams through a weekly status report to the whole class. While available support for the Solidity teams was not ideal, students learned to use available online resources for creating and testing smart contracts. Our findings suggest that a project-based learning approach is an effective way for students to expand and develop their knowledge of emerging technologies, like blockchain, and apply it in a variety of industries.

In this article commemorating 30 years of the "Journal of Information Systems Education," we reflect on our extraordinarily lucky careers together in the academic discipline of information systems. Both our careers and our field have seen continual growth, unrelenting change, and required adaptability. We credit our enduring and strong professional relationship and friendship with each other, the fun we've had with our collaborators (and especially our doctoral students), as well as our ability to adapt, as the keys to whatever positive outcomes we have enjoyed along the way. Given the rate of change in our field over the past 30 years, we are excited to think about what might transpire for us all over the next 30 years.

The Information System (IS) model curriculum has been advanced by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and other associations since the 1970s. The IS2002 and IS2010 curriculum models have been positively received by both academic institutions and industry alike. Each of these models used design principles to help guide the development process; these principles included concepts such as maximizing program flexibility or course sequencing to improve depth of knowledge. The most current undergraduate model (IS2010) that guides university curriculum is nearly 10 years old. In today's IS field, a curriculum should address previous design concepts; plus the environment in which IS professionals work has become even more dynamic and multifaceted. Given these challenges, a new IS model curriculum would benefit by including more programming concepts along with course sequencing. The authors propose a two-course sequence in areas such as computer programming to increase depth of knowledge and keep some program flexibility. Further, the authors recommend: (1) require a minimum amount of programming, (2) require technical infrastructure coverage, (3) allow for specialization, (4) specify sequencing to provide depth, and (5) identify both core competencies and course structure. These recommendations are not a criticism but build a new model with the strengths and knowledge gained in the past 10 years.

Critical thinking and problem solving skills are included in the IS curriculum as foundational skills. IS education researchers recognize the importance of these skills for future IS practitioners given the complexity of the technology based society and economy of the future. However, there is limited work on how these skills are best taught in IS. This research reports on a course focusing on the explicit development of critical thinking and problem solving skills of first-year IS students at the University of Pretoria. The critical thinking part of the course focuses on the analysis, evaluation of, and response to arguments. Class discussions and assessments are based on local, authentic arguments. In the problem solving skills component of the course, students are taught to understand the nature of a problem and to classify it as belonging to one of three categories: puzzles, problems, and messes. For each category, appropriate problem solving approaches are suggested and practiced. To illustrate the role of design and creativity in problem solving, students have to create an artefact using the Maker Space of the university. They have to apply the five phases of design thinking as suggested by the Stanford d.school design thinking approach. The course has been presented since 2016, and feedback is collected from students annually. Based on a feedback questionnaire that the students complete at the end of each course, we have reason to believe that they find the course valuable and consider those skills to be applicable to other courses as well as elsewhere in their lives. They also point out the value it holds for their future as IS practitioners. As part of our ongoing research, we are investigating ways to develop a critical disposition amongst students, an important component of critical thinking.

Disruptive innovations continue to reshape channels of learning. The Information Systems discipline may be among the least immune to these disruptions. As such, students have greater access to the acquisition of the computing skills and knowledge that are commonly presumed to suffice entry-level employment positions sought after by graduates of Information Systems programs. Further, these same technologies disrupting education are shaping the organizational and business environment such that it is fair to reflect on the disposition and complexion of the discipline as a whole and surmise whether this past will predict the future. Moreover, businesses and organizations are finding that the supply chain of workers needed to harness these disruptive technologies flows neither exclusively, nor even optimally, through academia. Upon reflection of this disruptive circumstance of skills and knowledge development, we consider subsuming the IS discipline into the broader auspice of design buttressed equally by emphases on technical excellence, business acumen, and leadership. We explore principles for a design-focused philosophy for Information Systems education that assumes that while higher education programs may have lost the lead in technology skills development focused on entry-level employment, we may reassert our role in computing education through the embrace of design at the philosophical, epistemological, and pedagogical levels.

The general purpose of this study is to conduct a content study on 'computer' and 'educational technologies' research and trends between 2016 and 2020. The topics were evaluated according to years, universities of the authors, citations, keywords, document type, source, sponsors and publication languages. The articles examined in the research include keywords related to 'computer' and 'instructional technologies' between 2016 and 2020; 1,798 articles obtained by scanning the Scopus database according to the title, keywords and summary of the articles were examined. When the results of the study were examined, it was concluded that English, which is the universal language, is very common; the researches are mostly published as 'conference papers' and the most used keyword in the study is 'Computer Science'. In addition, it has been concluded that computer science is the basis of educational technologies in recent years. Similar content analysis studies may be recommended for other software used in computer training.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies have a long history of being used in education for motivating learners and enhancing learning. However, there have also been critiques for a too uncritical and naïve implementation of AI in education (AIED) and the potential misuse of the technology. With the release of the virtual assistant ChatGPT from OpenAI, many educators and stakeholders were both amazed and horrified by the potential consequences for education. One field with a potential high impact of ChatGPT is programming education in Computer Science (CS), where creating assessments has long been a challenging task due to the vast amount of programming solutions and support on the Internet. This now appears to have been made even more challenging with ChatGPT's ability to produce both complex and seemingly novel solutions to programming questions. With the support of data collected from interactions with ChatGPT during the spring semester of 2023, this position paper investigates the potential opportunities and threats of ChatGPT for programming education, guided by the question: What could the potential consequences of ChatGPT be for programming education? This paper applies a methodological approach inspired by analytic autoethnography to investigate, experiment, and understand a novel technology through personal experiences. Through this approach, the authors have documented their interactions with ChatGPT in field diaries during the spring semester of 2023. Topics for the questions have related to content and assessment in higher education programming courses. A total of 6 field diaries, with 82 interactions (1 interaction = 1 question + 1 answer) and additional reflection notes, have been collected and analysed with thematic analysis. The study finds that there are several opportunities and threats of ChatGPT for programming education. Some are to be expected, such as that the quality of the question and the details provided highly impact the quality of the answer. However, other findings were unexpected, such as that ChatGPT appears to be "lying" in some answers and to an extent passes the Turing test, although the intelligence of ChatGPT should be questioned. The conclusion of the study is that ChatGPT have potential for a significant impact on higher education programming courses, and probably on education in general. The technology seems to facilitate both cheating and enhanced learning. What will it be? Cheating or AI-enhanced learning? This will be decided by our actions now since the technology is already here and expanding fast. [Note: The publication year (2023) shown in the citation on the PDF is incorrect. The correct publication year is 2024.]

This paper reflects on the process of designing and implementing an update to the "Introduction to Information Technology" course at Bentley University, a business university in New England. Driven by a university-wide curriculum reform initiative and following best practices from digital literacy frameworks and IS model curricula, the new CS 100 course, entitled "Solving Business Problems with Information Technology," shifted emphasis from a personal computing context to exploring small business applications of technology. Students networked with university alumni at "Topics in Tech" presentations, where they learned about career options as information technology professionals. The authors describe the pilot courses that led to proposing a new CS 100 course and reflect its challenges and successes. Challenges included meeting the university's goal of transfer friendliness, scaling from a few pilots to multiple sections, consistency of course delivery, and evaluating assessment. Successes include placing course topics in a business context, introducing current technologies, and providing opportunities for students to learn about career opportunities and experiences from university alumni. The paper also describes how CS 100 aligns with the university's student learning goals for the new curriculum. These include developing future-focused skills, encouraging curiosity and critical analysis, communicating and collaborating in different settings, and demonstrating understanding of issues related to ethical use of technology.

Learning computer programming is typically difficult for newcomers. Demotivation and learned helplessness have received much attention. Besides the subject's intricacy, low in-class participation has been associated with poor student achievement. This paper presents a follow-up, stage 2 study on the novel instructional technique, Student-Driven Probe Instruction (SDPI), to address low in-class participation in programming courses. Instead of the teacher lecturing/explaining content to the class and asking questions, students were shown a snippet of code or other relevant material and given the option to ask questions beforehand. The study was conducted in two stages: stage 1 pilot and stage 2. This paper presents the results of stage 2, while stage 1 operations and results are discussed briefly. The number of questions asked in class, real-time Trello board postings, and emails/Slack conversations with the instructor were used to track participation. In-class participation showed significant improvement. Average quiz and in-class activity scores showed marginal gains. Results from the end-of-course survey show that students preferred SDPI over the traditional lecture style since it stirred their interest in the content and provided them the confidence to ask questions in class. The study is purely exploratory in nature, and no conclusions can be drawn due to the extremely small sample size of the student population.

Interest in the study of computer technology in schools (often in the form of Computer Science subjects or coding initiatives) is seen to have undergone two waves of interest, one in the late 1970s/early 1980s and the other more recently since about 2010. Through a historical exploration of the rationales for the study of computer technology in schools in both the first wave and the second wave, this paper aimed to explore the various curriculum ideologies underpinning their justification. In doing so, the paper highlights the chameleon-like nature of this change agenda in aligning with contemporary trends to advance the study of computer technology on the curriculum. The paper argues that current manifestations of the study of computer technology in schools are at odds with broader curriculum reform goals and international policies and raises questions about students' access to such knowledge.

This small scale study aims to analyze the question papers of Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in the subject of computer science with reference to item analysis and Bloom's taxonomy. Data were collected from 100 students of Grade 9th and 10th from the schools of Lahore city using convenient sampling technique. Data collected on the papers developed by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education for the year of 2015 and 2016. Item analyses were performed using Conquest software. Findings of the study shows that in the question papers conducted by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education the majority questions were measuring the student abilities of knowledge and comprehension and only few questions were given to measure the student abilities to analyze, synthesize and evaluate, and this can be very helpful for the policy makers. Result of item analysis shows that many questions were not in the acceptable range of item difficulty and item discrimination. Items in the question papers were either too easy or too difficult. Findings revealed that the papers conducted and administered by Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education were not up to the mark, with reference to Bloom's taxonomy. The researcher recommended to train the assessment committee/panel developing the items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many universities have, or are facing, the task of providing high quality essential customer services with fewer financial and human resources. The growing diversity of students, their needs and proficiencies, along with the increasing variety of university program offerings, make providing customized, ondemand, automated solutions crucial to delivering high quality customer service. In this paper, the authors describe the development of an artificial intelligence-backed chatbot to aid in answering student advisement questions. The main objective of the chatbot is to provide 24/7 supplemental program specific advising assistance to graduate computer science majors to lessen the advising load of university faculty. In this paper, the authors describe the development of a chatbot prototype using IBM Watson Assistant running on a specially designed website and Slack platform to address frequently asked questions of computer science graduate students. Results of a pilot study conducted on 99 graduate students indicate that the prototype is a positive step forward in making student advising accessible, usable, and scalable to a broader audience.

This paper is an experiential report describing the faculty and student experiences and knowledge gained from developing an Internet of Things (IoT) course within an Information Technology (IT) Department at a large southeastern United States public university. The paper contributes insights gained developing the introductory IoT course, and it recommends the inclusion of IoT technology within an IT curriculum due to its disruptive and transformative nature. Many industries are deploying IoT applications making it imperative that IT graduates have the knowledge and skills needed to work with this emerging technology. The faculty leveraged the use of the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) Instructional Design Model to develop a pilot course in the summer of 2022 and then, based on the pilot feedback and analysis using ADDIE, refined the course design for spring 2023. The continuing course development draws on IT undergraduate curricula guidelines in "Information Technology Curricula 2017 (IT2017)," research into how industry uses IoT applications, and the use of hands-on educational technologies to identify and apply IoT knowledge and skills needed for IT graduates. The pervasive nature of IoT requires IoT faculty to have knowledge of each of the IT Pillars (programming, networking, human-computer interaction, databases, and web systems) as well as the IT Supplemental IoT Domain guidelines developed in "IT2017."

The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge transfer to students. The University of South Africa (Unisa) makes provision for contact sessions of 15 hours per semester for selected modules in an attempt to elevate the pedagogical efficiency of these sessions by focusing on the threshold concepts as an innovative way of learning. This paper shows that tutorials adopting the threshold concepts approach have the potential to make students academically more successful. The focus of this study is an introductory information systems module that teaches the Python programming language. Our statistical analysis demonstrated that the year marks and final exam scores of the participating students were frequently higher than those of the students in the control group.

This paper describes the study of enforcement of prerequisites in the Computer Science program at a regional university in the Southwest. Prerequisites are a significant factor in programs of study in higher education. Allowing students to register in courses may assume that they have existing knowledge and skills. Some programs treat prerequisites as advisory, while others consider them mandatory. In the latter case, procedures usually exist to make exceptions in the form of registration overrides. The state of prerequisite enforcement at our university over the years, and some factors that may have influenced adherence to the prerequisite structure over the years, will be discussed in this paper.

This paper proposes a Project-based team instruction methodology with open-ended projects to teach students critical analysis, design and implementation steps of developing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for information systems. The use of project-based learning is appropriate for teaching RPA analysis and design with lean Six Sigma tools because of its experimental approach and documentation of logical steps needed to learn how to implement RPA successfully. The approach systematically documents work currently performed and defines future actions of the process while ensuring significant benefits are achieved with the RPA enhanced process. This methodology is important because the application of RPA is not commonly taught in Management Information System (MIS) programs. MIS students may not understand the significance of combined methodology, RPA tool, and usefulness of RPA until they enter the workforce where RPA is rapidly becoming available and easier to implement. The lecture sessions and exercises are valuable because it is easy to communicate the value of RPA in terms of time, quality, volume of transactions, etc. using Lean Six Sigma analytic approaches. The exercises involve hands on activities to make this learning experience interesting for students to readily associate the theoretical process improvement agreement and visualize the practical value of RPA enhanced projects. The paper discusses the need for process changes (and new development approaches) in organization to match the properties and functions within enterprise systems and ERPs that has led to criticism of the enterprise systems. This criticism is attributable to the ERPs' many subfunctions and operations that have limited adaptability and reduced functional and operational flexibility. The RPAs require limited prior knowledge of ERPs or their sub-processes for the improvements that are made in the performance of the organization. Thus, students do not have to "learn" how these enterprise or ERP systems operate to make changes or task improvements. This paper presents a project-based methodology and design approach focusing on development of RPAs that help students learning how to make the improvements using the RPS tools. The students learn that projects can deliver significant and tangible benefits to organizations while engaging students in key activities of the analysis, design and development process from a low code-no code perspective.

This paper unites the history of Computer Science (CS) Education in Ireland by plotting Ireland's roadmap leading to the implementation of formal Computer Science Education in schools. It first outlines the educational system in Ireland. The history roadmap starts in the 1970s with the first notions of introducing computing in post-primary school, and then continues up to the roll-out the CS curriculum in Ireland at the Senior Cycle level in 2018. The story is chiefly available in disparate publications and reports, so piecing together the entire story is often difficult. This paper collates the available literature, together with the authors' local knowledge of the process, into one paper that may be of interest locally and of value to other jurisdictions beginning their planning of national curricula. The paper describes the development and the current situation of the formal curricula in CS at second level. The current landscape of Computing Education at primary level, which at the time of writing is in the planning stages in Ireland, is described. Additionally, an investigation into the introduction of Computing Education in schools in the international jurisdictions that directly influenced the Irish roll-out takes place, to summarize any lessons learned that might provide insights for Ireland going forward.

This article investigates citation and research collaboration habits of faculty in four engineering departments. The analysis focuses on similarities and differences among the engineering disciplines. Main differences exist in the use of conference papers and technical reports. The age of cited materials varies by discipline and by format. Regarding faculty connection with other subjects, the study finds that aerospace and mechanical engineering faculty collaborate more often with researchers outside their fields, while civil and environmental faculty, as well as electrical and computer engineering faculty, are more likely to cooperate with peers in their fields. Lists of highly cited journals are generated. The paper also provides suggestions for collection management, research assistance, and outreach efforts.