Dr. William Mitchell
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
wmmitchell@ualr.edu
The state of Arkansas has declared that there is a shortage of IT workers in the state. In 1999 the Arkansas Department of Higher Education Coordinating Board approved and the Legislature made a special appropriation to create the Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. This new College annexed the existing departments of Computer Science, Construction Management, Engineering Technology, and Applied Science and authorized the development of two new programs in Information Science and Systems Engineering. Thus the new college houses all of the technology-based programs in the University and is consequently called the Cyber College. It is authorized to recruit faculty for each of the new programs and to implement curricula based on a needs assessment that the University conducted in conjunction with local industry.
At this writing the Cyber College is almost two years old and it has begun to refine its programs, which range from the existing CSAB-accredited Computer Science program and the Ph.D. granting department of Applied Science to the under-staffed namesake programs and an innovative upper-division minor in Information Technology for non-DCISSE students. In order to fulfill its mission to rapidly increase the quantity and quality of the state's IT workforce, the college must conduct research in IT that will guide its recruitment, retention, and production of graduates to the satisfaction of cooperating industry and the legislature. This research entails careful data collection of applicant attributes, analysis of performance and attrition statistics, and detection of learning impediments. It also involves the assessment of attitudinal and motivational preferences of students and a careful evaluation of pedagogy. The college is well equipped to handle this challenge, and it recognizes that this research and the incorporation of the research results are critical to its mission.
The emphasis of the Cyber College’s curricula is set by a report published in April 1999[1], the work of task force appointed by the Chancellor to conduct extensive interviews with persons in industry, conduct focus group sessions, and develop an detailed Internet survey. This report differentiates between the various levels of need in information-based personnel, covering requirements at the general education and specialized technician level to professional engineers and information specialists. The report catalogs in considerable detail the knowledge base and skill set that the IT industry in Arkansas would prefer that graduates have, clustered in terms of computer programmers, systems/business analysts, computer engineers, database administrators, computer support specialists, network specialists, telecommunications analysts, and internet specialists.
The College’s first task has been to create the curricula for the new degree programs in Systems Engineering and in Information Science, building on the models available in other Universities with like-named degrees, but adhering to the goals set by the IT Report.
Information Science as broadly defined concerns the efficient methods to automatically encode, store, retrieve, and manipulate data of any kind. Information Science enables computing systems to convert data into decisions by discerning meaning in data aggregations and by displaying that meaning on an as-needed basis. The tools of the information scientist are the software packages built to do database operations, statistical analysis, search techniques and information retrieval, GUI building and visualization for decision support, and information modeling. Information science has been part of the title of many computer science departments and it is part of the title of many library schools because each was concerned with one or more of these approaches to data. At UALR the information scientist is knowledgeable about the technologies of servers, networks, and secondary storage devices that house data, and the information scientist develops and applies techniques of data modeling, descriptive and analytical statistics, decision theory, data mining techniques, and client/server principles. At UALR the Information Science undergraduate degree emphasizes the skills to use the technology that encapsulates large data stores and builds proficiency in making those stores useful to knowledge workers. The graduate will be attractive to companies that want to enhance the usefulness of their data, companies that need to develop new data-based applications, companies with databases or decision support systems that must be tuned or extended, and companies interested in e-commerce (using the web as an information system).
The rapidly expanding growth of computer-based applications necessitates the emergence of specialized computer-based disciplines. The computer science discipline has spawned software engineering, computational science, and now information science seeks to stand on its own. Information Science can be distinguished from other computer-based disciplines on many dimensions. Information Science is an engineering-oriented discipline because it is focused on the purposeful extraction of relevant information from electronic data collections. Information Science is a foundation for all information systems because information science provides expertise about the representation, configuration, and association of data and the technologies that host data manipulation. Information Science takes data as its focus, not algorithms; it is concerned with patterns, not simply computations; and it would prefer that the computing devices themselves be transparent mediators between the decision-maker and the data. Information Science is concerned with hardware and software design to the extent that it guides their development along lines that will make the use of data and the process of information extraction and decision-making more efficient and effective.
Information Scientists collaborate with Computer Scientists without sharing their abstract focus on the software artifact and the devices that perform them. Instead, information scientists focus on the meaning that is being manipulated by the machine. Information scientists collaborate with CIS experts from the business community without sharing their narrow focus on how to use computers to support business processes. Information scientists take as their audience the knowledge worker and seek to elucidate the principles that inform generic information systems as well as understand the nature of the distinctions inherent in library information systems, scientific information systems, medical information systems or management information systems. Information Scientists collaborate with Systems Engineers without sharing their narrow focus on the technologies of interacting machines. Information Science is interested in information theory (abstract information), but it is more focused on knowledge acquisition, the motivation of the knowledge user and the mechanisms that facilitate the user’s goal. Therefore the Information Scientist, like the software engineer, has practical concerns about how information systems work. These concerns stretch from appreciating the decisions that are informed by information system, to the interface that provides access to the information, to the efficient distribution of that access in the organization and the integrity of the data that is the source of the information.
One reason why Arkansas does not already produce enough information technology workers to meet its needs is that there is insufficient emphasis on mathematics, science, and technology in its high schools. Arkansas is still a rural state that is just beginning to promote high-tech careers to its youth. The greatest single failure of its schools is the failure to prepare more than a miniscule proportion of its students to start calculus as college freshmen. Most of the degree programs in the new Cyber College require some level of calculus; so all the programs are affected by the deficiency in mathematics training in the state. While not counting pre-calculus in the major, the Information Science program has to leave time in the freshman year for students to complete as much as a year of pre-calculus mathematics.
While lacking the appropriate foundation in mathematics, most applicants have some experience with computers and are very interested in obtaining the credentials to qualify for high tech (high paying) jobs. Unfortunately, few have had any contact with the IT profession and so they have little conception as to either the work environment or the job duties. Therefore the challenge of the freshman year is to both broaden horizons and to sharpen skills that will be important as the student matures as a professional
The freshman year curriculum in information science has as its focus the orientation and leveling of the great variety of students who are drawn to the new major. In the first semester the student is advised to take a one-hour introduction to the ethical issues posed by technology, a course developed and offered by the Philosophy department for the whole college. They also take a three-credit course in problem solving as the introduction to the major. This course has been radically revised in response to experience. In its second incarnation this course combines material common to what is often called CS-0: some discrete mathematics topics (specifically number systems), a survey of the jobs in information systems, and a presentation of some of the common tools in Information Science, emphasizing algorithms and their descriptions, characteristics of programming languages, and including an overview of the Unified Modeling Language and design patterns. Work habits are emphasized with firm deadlines and log entries made every meeting to monitor time expended and grasp of material. The third entry-level class is a closed lab for two credits that insures uniform familiarity with the desktop technologies usually covered in a computer literacy course. This lab is for students who are vaguely familiar with computer and internet use and have learned just enough to get along. The course comprises 25 core labs (each two hours in duration) with 13 devoted to the tools in the Microsoft Office suite, including an introduction to macros, and eight FrontPage labs that explore a majority of the HTML 4.0 tags. The labs are designed with dual goals: they provide a degree of competence to students who are hungry to acquire marketable skills (they become novice power users), and they acquire an appreciation of software objects by virtue of the lab stressing the interface to, and properties of, the run-time objects employed by the various applications.
The second semester continues to build understanding and depth in the development of web pages in a lecture course on web technologies that covers some CGI programming but focuses on dynamic HTML, the object model for web page, client-side scripting, and introductory site maintenance using style sheets. In parallel there is a second two-hour closed lab course that exposes students first to the UNIX shell and shell scripts and then turns to of 20 labs on Visual Basic. These labs first introduce the IDE and focus on GUI-building with the standard components. Starting with event programming the labs expose students to basic programming concepts stressing the use of pre-written functionality and the modification property tables. Looping and arrays are touched on, but greater emphasis is placed on sub-procedures and parameter passing, on communicating between modules and forms, and on converting data types. The fundamental idea that stressed is that names that designate data objects are conceptually treated identically to the names we used for GUI components. We introduce files and the ADO database interface, continually emphasizing the mechanics of using the pre-written components. As the labs pursue more complex applications, additional features of the IDE are covered, including the debugger. However, the course is less a programming course than an exploration of the rapid prototyping capability provided by the Visual Basic IDE.
The two closed lab courses are used by Engineering Technology students and all the freshman courses except the problem-solving course are promoted to students from across and outside the college who want to learn how to be a power user or how to get into web page design. In the problem-solving course the majors are sensitized to understand the object-centric nature of the software artifacts that they encounter in these courses. Objects are pointedly manipulated in both the lab courses, object modeling is introduced in the problem-solving course, and the object model of the web page is used explicitly in the Internet Technologies course. We have discovered that a few Arkansas high schools give students the opportunity to do quite a bit on the desktop, both with Office tools and with web page building, so we waive the first lab course for those students. We have also found that many students who are naïve about computers are not able to learn solely through the lab experience, and those we direct to the three-hour computer literacy course offered by the Computer Science department (this sorting can be accomplished during the first month of the semester without much disruption).
The sophomore year major courses are a yearlong introduction to Java programming, an introductory computer hardware course modeled on the A+ certification, and an introduction to object-oriented systems analysis, emphasizing the Unified Modeling Language. After we balance the UML presented in the problem-solving course and its use in the Systems Analysis course, we will consider adding a software modeling tool to this course. The Java sequence begins with the design of class hierarchies and pursues the use of inheritance to gain functionality and polymorphism to refine it. The first course emphasizes software engineering principles of code reuse, testing, and design for modification. Assignments review the manipulation of objects and simple control structures on the level encountered in VB, and then the course focuses on Java’s collection manipulation facilities and the input and output of objects. This is the first lecture course on programming but the lab experiences have broken most of the ice so that we can proceed rapidly. To ease the transition from closed lab to lecture, we have added a weekly lab to the course. The second course continues exploring Java but now the focus changes to applets and the Swing components. Animation motivates introducing threads and synchronization. Considerable time is devoted to studying GUI design and good principles of Human-Computer Interaction. Java will be used when a programming interface is needed over the rest of the curriculum, but the goal is not to prepare expert coders. Future programming exercises will emphasize connecting components via APIs with the understanding that Information Science professionals will be expert API users. .
At the end of the second year the student has a solid basis in the technology of web design and is well prepared to contribute on an e-commerce development team. The student can appreciate the basics of the hardware components of the system, understand the human and organizational context in which the development team works, and the student has been exposed to the concepts and tools used to code sophisticated web pages. By the end of the sophomore year the student has also completed a year of calculus and a course in discrete mathematics. This mathematics is prerequisite to the Junior year major courses. Sophomores complete a cognitive psychology course to reinforce their study of human factors of computer interaction. The Information Science major also completes speech and technical writing courses and the pedagogy in all the lower division courses include team activities and presentations.
The junior year of the curriculum will introduce a spectrum of database topics. The first database course is an introduction to the design of relational and object-oriented databases that will employ Oracle and SQL Server. This course will be followed by a survey of leading database applications, looking at the variety of e-commerce, bioinformatics, and library information systems technologies that illustrate the variety of data possibilities and the disparate information extraction needs of the data users. The example applications also give students more practice employing Oracle and SQL. In parallel to these two courses the student will be looking at the hardware architectures and operating systems concepts that databases employ. The technologies of storage systems, file systems, servers, clusters, concurrency, security and networking are explored in a yearlong sequence. In the second semester of the junior year the student adds an applied networking course that introduces network administration, routing, and some network management tools. Concurrently in the junior year the information science major is taking a calculus-based introduction to statistics course followed by a quantitative methods course that will explore decision making models and develop the mathematics behind searching, indexing, and data mining.
At the start of the senior year the student will have an appreciation of database technology, the methods for storing and accessing external data collections, and an acquaintance with a variety of data analysis techniques. In combination with the programming tools and systems concepts acquired in the first two years, the information science major now has a foundation for addressing in great detail the character of real information systems.
The major courses in the senior year will include a two course capstone sequence that first does a case study of a live information system that covers review of code and documentation, interviews with system maintainers and users, and discussions with management on the system’s goals and future. In the following semester the team will engage in an enhancement project. This experience is supplemented by a two-credit ethics course designed for information science professionals and a senior course in resource management from the College of Business Administration. The major’s preparation is completed by four courses in a specialization track. We have planned an Internet specialization and a knowledge systems specialization, but we have also thought about a bioinformatics specialty and maybe a research/thesis option. The Internet specialization will encompass courses on browser technologies and multimedia, server technologies such as directory services, document services, message services, transaction processing, the role of components such as beans, WAN technologies and Internet 2, and the role of other broadband services such as DSL. The knowledge systems specializations will include search engine technologies, automated indexing, data mining, encryption technologies, visualization, and advanced database concepts for objects, multimedia data, and decision-support.
The senior year intends to focus on the state-of-the-art in the use of information science and to bridge the student from the ideal to the practical. The first offering of these courses is still two years away and the faculty who will develop them are yet to be hired. The Information Science graduate will be prepared to use technology to extract knowledge from data and will understand the technology of data storage, retrieval, and distribution. Where Computer Science has battled with the tendency to equate its study with the skill of programming, Information Science at UALR has three sturdy legs: first, object-oriented database technologies from design through networked implementation, second, encoding of meanings into data and the science of recovering that meaning and new knowledge by search, and third, a focus on making computer systems more useable, specifically those created for knowledge workers.
All of the programs in the new Cyber College are professional in orientation and expected to qualify for accreditation by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. The degree requirements in Information Science consequently include 17 semester hours of mathematics, 8 hours of lab science and 55 hours in the major. Communications skills are developed in a year of composition plus a semester each of speech and technical writing. 20 hours are taken in humanities and social sciences, including ethics, and 9 hours of cognate work is included from Management and Psychology (a degree check sheet is included as an appendix). Both the core and elective courses in the major include design experiences and present theoretical material. The major encompasses hardware architecture, operating systems, databases, networking, and Internet technologies. Majors use the object paradigm throughout the curriculum, in problem specification, in design, and in programming. Majors will be strong in data modeling techniques and will have a deep exposure to working information systems to inform their theoretical knowledge of the architectural components of such systems.
Program and student outcomes assessment are incorporated into the curriculum because of its leveled design. The external constituency identification began with the IT report developed with the cooperation of the Knowledge-based Industry Council of Central Arkansas. As the curriculum goals have been articulated into courses, they have been reviewed and validated by the department’s Industrial Advisory Board. Moreover, a student advisory panel has been formed to make suggestions to the department concerning the laboratory facilities, the pedagogical practices, and the tools presented in the curriculum. Eventually the program will have alumni, and we will be ready to track their careers and to survey their employers. In the meantime, we are measuring student performance year by year in terms of input and exit characteristics course by course.
Attrition is monitored course by course throughout the college and admission to college programs is also carefully monitored. Prerequisites are enforced. Both Information Science and Computer Science programs have large numbers of non-majors who want exposure to specific computing skills and thus we have the opportunity to compare how students (generally upper classmen) fare in our freshman and sophomore courses in comparison with lower division majors. The data being collected will allow us to clarify our expectations and standards and to consistently reinforce the core concepts that are the focus each year of the curriculum. The freshman year aims at preparing for the Java sequence and developing web-worker skills. The first two years round out a client-side development foundation and lay a basis in UML that is exploited in presenting data modeling and analysis in the junior year. The senior year insures the melding of hardware, software, and human factors principles in the crucible of diagnosing live systems.
Information Science topics and concepts have traditionally been a part of a Computer Science curriculum, so much so that many computer science departments include “Information” in their names. Yet it has not been traditional to focus on data within a computer science curriculum. Data is handled, data is processed, but data is merely a characteristic of the application, and the focus is on the algorithms implement in software and the design of hardware that accomplish the application. In Arkansas the knowledge-based companies such as Acxiom and companies focusing on e-commerce, such as WalMart, are looking beyond the software application coder and the database designer, each with abstract technical knowledge, looking for the IT professional who appreciates that data drives the company and that the information extracted from the data drives the decisions that make the difference in the marketplace. It is said that we live in the “information overload” age, but that merely emphasizes the point that we are not using our data effectively. It is not enough to build faster machines, or design more efficient algorithms, or implement larger databases if we do not make better use of the increased capability. Its not how much data we have (for instance the World Wide Web), but what sense can we make of the data. Information Science is about using computer technology to do sense-making. As the Cyber College matures, we hope to produce a new variety of information technologist, one skilled at using component technologies to search and filter large data stores that have been appropriately configured to support the needs of knowledge workers. This new professional will contribute a missing perspective to a team approach to designing and implementing successful information systems in all areas of our society.
The storage and retrieval of information has been the focus of study by library scholars for centuries. The advent of computers that automated the storage and retrieval of textual information has led not only to a totally new enterprise of electronic publishing of hypermedia and multi-media documents, but to the development of a new science, rooted in mathematical models for building associations and pattern detection. The automation of knowledge processing goes as far beyond library science as word processing transcends writing. The computer technologies that sustain and augment data aggregation and analysis extend previous notions both of library science and of data processing to the point where a new term might be more appropriate. If informatics were not already a synonym for computer science, it would be a good candidate.
The automated knowledge industry is already generating new specialists: electronic media experts, information architects, webmasters, data miners, etc., most providing the expertise need to conduct business on the web. The immense value inherent in large data collections, measured in the cost to collect and maintain the store and well as the potential gain from extracting encapsulated knowledge mandates the emergence of a new class of data conservators and analysts who will insure that society reaps the benefits of data aggregation. UALR aims to formally prepare information scientists to accomplish this essential task. It is plain to us that neither Computer Science nor the various engineering disciplines that deal with computer phenomena provide the emphasis on data and its use by knowledge workers that is needed to do this work (see form letter to high school seniors in Appendix). UALR’s Information Science degree is a computer-based degree that emphasizes data.
REFERENCE
1. http://www.ualr.edu/~itreport/
APPENDIX
` UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK
Donaghey College of Information Science & Systems Engineering
2001-2002CATALOG
CREDIT
CORE CURRICULUM REQUIREMENTS HOURS
WRITTEN and ORAL LITERACY - 12 HOURS
____ RHET 1311 Composition I and 3
____ RHET 1312 Composition II 3
____ SPCH 1300 Speech Communication 3
____RHET 3326 Technical Writing 3
MATH and STATISTICS – 12 - 14 HOURS
____ MATH 1304 Calculus I and 6
____MATH 1305 Calculus II
or
___MATH 1451 Engineering Calculus I and 8
___MATH 1452 Engineering Calculus II
___MATH 2310 Discrete Mathematics and 3
___STAT 3352 Applied Statistics I 3
U.S. TRADITIONS - 3 HOURS 3
____ HIST 2311 U.S. History to 1877 or
____ HIST 2312 U.S. History from 1877 or
____ POLS 1310 American National Government
WORLD HISTORY – 3 HOURS 3
___HIST 1311 History of Civilization I or
___HIST 1312 History of Civilization II
WORLD HUMANITIES - 3 HOURS 3
____ ENGL 2337 World Literature
____ ENGL 2338 World Literature
CREATIVE ARTS - 2 HOURS 2-3
____ FNAR 2300 Introduction to Fine Arts I or
____ ARHA 2200 Introduction to Visual Arts or
____ MUHL 2200 Introduction to Music or
____ DRTH 2200 Introduction to Theater and Dance
LAB SCIENCE – 8 HOURS
____ PHYS 2321General Physics I and 3
____ PHYS 2121 General Physics I Lab 1
____ PHYS 2322 General Physics II and 3
____ PHYS 2122 General Physics II Lab 1
INDIVIDUALS, CULTURES & SOCIETIES - 3 HOURS
____ PSYC 2300 Psychology & the Human Experience 3
TOTAL HOURS 46 - 49
CREDIT
MAJOR REQUIREMENTS HOURS
____ IFSC 1201 Enterprise Info Science I 2
____ IFSC 1202 Enterprise Info Science II 2
____ IFSC 1305 Problem Solving Techniques 3
____ IFSC 1310 Internet Technologies 3
____ IFSC 2300 Object Oriented Technology 3
____ IFSC 2305 Computer Systems 3
____ IFSC 2310 System Analysis 3
____IFSC 2340 Human Computer Interface 3
____IFSC 3305 Information System Software I 3
____IFSC 3310 Information System Software II 3
____IFSC 3315 Applied Networking 3
____IFSC 3320 Database Concepts 3
____IFSC 3330 Current Trends in Database Techchnology 3
____IFSC 3350 Quantitative Analysis 3
____ IFSC 4396 Information Systems Applications 3
____IFSC 4398 Capstone Project 3
COGNATE REQUIREMENTS – 18 HOURS
____IFSC 1110 Introduction to Ethics 1
____PSYC 3380 Cognitive Psychology 3
____ECON 3301 Survey of Economics 3
____MGMT 3300 Organizational Behavior and Management 3
____MGMT 4331 Management of Information Resources 3
____IFSC 4210 Computer Ethics 2
____IFSC 4301 History of Technology or 3
____IFSC 4364 History of American Enterprise 3
FREE ELECTIVES – 6 - 8 HOURS
____
____
____
____IFSC 3
____IFSC 3
____IFSC 3
____IFSC 3
TOTAL HOURS Major, Cognates, and Electives 82-84
TOTAL HOURS REQUIRED FOR DEGREE 130
· Eligibility to take MATH 1451, and familiarity with desktop computers.
Graduation Requirements:
· 2.0 GPA overall
· Ability to pass the Writing Proficiency Exam
Form Letter Sent To High School Seniors
<date>
Dear <first name> ,
Dean Hampton has passed your name to me as being a student interested in the Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Information Science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. This is a new program that is now in its second year and will graduate its first class in 2003. I enclose a brochure that outlines the curriculum requirements and discusses the differences that UALR makes between Information Science, Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, and Systems Engineering, all of which are majors at UALR.
Information Science is the most innovative of the four programs and its mixture of mathematics, human factors, technology, and project emphasis is unique in Arkansas. At UALR, those interested in the World Wide Web major in Information Science where web work is part of the major’s core. Information Science is the only major that focuses on the object paradigm, introducing object technologies in every year of the curriculum. The instructional goals and techniques in Information Science are also unique as we are guided by a study done two years ago with the knowledge-based industries of central Arkansas. This study identified both hard and soft skills that Arkansas employers want in information technology workers. As a consequence, the Information Science curriculum features a lot of hands-on laboratory work, a lot of team exercises, and a lot of presentations (visit our website at http://www.ualr.edu/~CISSE).
<first name>, all of the majors in UALR’s “Cyber College” graduate with strong analytic tools, including calculus, an appreciation for the methods of the physical or biological sciences, and an in-depth preparation in specific computer technologies. In your first semester in the Information Science major you will learn desktop computing skills in a laboratory setting and problem-solving skills that prepare you for object-oriented programming. In your second semester, Visual Basic and web page building with HTML and JavaScripting will develop that problem-solving ability. Your sophomore year brings a yearlong course in Java and semester courses in computer hardware and in systems analysis. Your junior year presents databases, the operating systems that support them, and the networking principles that permit distributed data storage and access. In you senior year you will do a real-world capstone team project and use four electives to develop deep exposure to an area such as e-commerce. This curriculum is demanding in its breadth and depth and will certainly not be for everyone. We hope that you will take the challenge and arrive prepared to complete it. Arkansas needs the skills that UALR seeks to develop and thus you will be rewarded for acquiring these skills with a high salary, job security, and the personal satisfaction derived from employment in a dynamic field.
If I can answer any questions about Information Science please email me at wmmitchell@ualr.edu.
Sincerely,
Dr. William Mitchell
Coordinator of Information Science