Curriculum Development in Information Technology

FUSING COMMUNICATION AND WRITING SKILLS IN THE 21ST CENTURY’S COMPUTING CURRICULUM

ABSTRACT

Written communication has been listed as the top explicitly requested skill by employers for a long time. Despite pressure from industry, the gap still exists between the expectations and average written and communication skills of current computing science graduates. This paper addresses the above issues and discusses incorporating written communication requirements into today’s computing curriculum. Drawing from the nation-wide university initiative of “Writing Across the Curriculum” (WAC) in the 1980s, our university’s "Writing Intensive (WI)" course requirements are reviewed. The paper covers the rationale and strategy used to convert three existing courses in our Information Technology (IT) program into WI courses to meet university writing requirements. Furthermore, the paper discusses faculty preparation, and some lessons learned. The study gives pragmatic guidance for educators in the computing discipline who want to enhance the writing and communication skills of their students.

INTRODUCTION

Surprisingly, as early as a century ago, many engineering industry representatives recognized that the graduates they were hiring lacked writing skills. In response to a survey, employees wrote that they believed that recruits “did not have adequate English skills to perform their work” [1, p91]. Ninety years later, based on a survey conducted by the National Society of Professional Engineers in 1991, the same issue still haunted the industry. In this survey, practitioners from the engineering and technology fields called for educators to provide “more instructions in written and oral communications” [2]. Also in a recent study [3], the authors examined employment advertisements for software engineers from fifty companies on the website Monster.com on one day. Written communication was listed as the top explicitly requested skill by employers pointing to...