<<The paradigm shift in business computing due to the emergence of
service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management
(BPM) left traditional college level computer science curriculum
behind the curve.
Dr. Paul Buhler, associate professor of computer science and graduate
program director at the College of Charleston in Charleston, S.C., is
working update curriculum at his school to meet the needs of students
who will graduate and find jobs in IT departments doing SOA.
Pointing to data from the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute
that indicates a decline in computer science enrollment nationwide, he
said his colleagues in academia are not unaware that curriculum needs
to be updated. A gap has developed during the past five or six years
as software vendors and IT departments moved to building applications
using Web services, while the academic world continued to teach
programming approaches that were little changed in three decades.
"There have been some papers written that indicate computer science
curriculum got stuck and did not pick up on the distributed object
paradigm, which paved the way for CORBA technology, XML-RPC, Java RMI
that were foundational to today's services," Buhler said.
Academia has been questioning its traditional approach to computer
science for the past six years, he said, as it's been going through
the much publicized decline in computer science enrollments.
"Since the fall of 2000 to the fall of last year, the decline in
computer science enrollments, freshman matriculation into computer
science, has been 70 percent," Buhler noted.
That is now a wake up call inside the ivy covered walls, where Buhler
and his colleagues are starting to re-think what computer science
departments need to teach.
"Computer science curriculum today is still based upon traditional
systems assumptions," Buhler said. "I think we need to tweak curricula
to be updated and recognize distributed systems assumptions."
The old curriculum assumes that software is being built on homogeneous
hardware and operating systems, something that was true in the heyday
of mainframes and continued to some extent into the client/server era,
but it is increasingly rare to encounter homogeneous environments in
today's enterprise.
Buhler points out that the way software is developed has changed from
creation of programs that were centrally configured and managed on
homogeneous hardware and operating systems, to software that is now
being composed of services running in today's heterogeneous environments.
"Software development is no longer an act of pure creation, but is
often an act of composition," he said. "Composition with software
development frameworks as services is something that needs to push
curricula in a different direction."
Buhler does not advocate a radical change to computer science
curriculum. He said there are students who want to focus on research
and the theoretical side of computer technology, which has
traditionally been the province of the academic world.
What he is working on is a new major that would focus on SOA and BPM
and bridge the gap between computer science and business education in
ways that are similar to the way SOA is bringing together architects,
developers and business analysts in the enterprise.
"At the College of Charleston what we are in the process of doing is
standing up a new major that sits somewhere between computer science
and business," Buhler explained. "We haven't formally named this
major, but it's been inspired by IBM's SSME [Service Science,
Management and Engineering] initiative."
SSME is IBM's effort to bridge the gap between the academic world and
the service-oriented world by providing professors such as Buhler with
help in developing curriculum focused on SOA, BPM and other
technologies for application composition.
Buhler prefers the term service-oriented computing (SOC) to describe
all the technologies now emerging as a new approach to business
applications. In the new curriculum SOC will encompass SOA, BPM and
service-oriented development of applications (SODA).
"That's the new world of curriculum," the professor said. "We're
working to create a blended skill set with the assumption that the
students who will be graduating in this type of curriculum will be
able to do things like compose services into a business process. They
will be able to bridge the gap and talk to the business analysts and
be able to serve as a liaison between the business analysts and the IT
folks in terms of design and process. It's a different skill set and I
believe there is a ready market for people who have this new set of
skills."
Buhler is in the process of putting together a curriculum proposal
that will need to be approved by the faculty senate at the College of
Charleston and by the Commission of Higher Education in South Carolina.
He said he already has buy-in throughout the administrative chain at
the college and is confident the service-oriented curriculum will be
approved, although because the process takes time, it is not ready for
this academic year. He expects the new service-oriented curriculum to
be in place in either the fall or spring of 2008/2009 academic year.
However, service-oriented computing is already part of the graduate
program he directs. That program primarily draws students who are
already working in the IT departments of business and government, and
are seeking advanced education, he explained. Service-orientation is
already a part of the world they work in, so graduate courses are
aimed at providing them with a better understanding of SOA, BPM and
related technologies, Buhler said.>>
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This sounds revolutionary. When I entered the industry over 20 years
ago, Computer Science faculties (should it not rather be "Computer
Technology"??) taught stuff that was both fundamental and about 10
years out of date, usually with the excuse that undergraduates at
least had to learn the basics (e.g. machine code) even if they were
hardly used in practice. Later on I came across CS faculties with a
more relevant approach, but not always where you might expect it.
South Africa for instance in the late 80s seemed to have IT faculties
that were way ahead of most of their European contemporaries.
Gervas
