Discipline: Computer Sciences & Information Management
Subcategory: STEM Science and Mathematics Education
Debzani Deb - Winston-Salem State University
Big data and cloud computing (BDCloud) collectively offer a paradigm shift in the way businesses are now acquiring, using and managing information technology. With the fast growth of this paradigm, businesses are struggling to find experienced people who not only have the deep analytical skills, but also have the data hosting, storage and management skills to effectively leverage this collective model. We believe that CS and IT students should be equipped with foundation knowledge in this collective paradigm and should possess hand-on-experiences in managing big data applications in clouds to acquire skills that are necessary to meet current and future industry demands. We argue that for substantial coverage of big data and cloud computing concepts and skills, the interventions need to be gradual and systematic and should be integrated into multiple core (required) courses of CS/IT curriculum. This research aims to identify a sequence of core CS/IT courses, where BDCloud related topics can be integrated with the goal of providing an increasing and systematic depth of coverage throughout the curricula. This NSF funded project will support a multi-course intervention during the next three years and will continuously assess student interest and learning. The study results will be useful for CS/IT students and their instructors as it will identify BDCloud topics that are important to cover, find a sequence of the prescribed topics that can be incorporated into existing core courses most effectively, and suggest specific core courses in which their coverage might find an appropriate context. The poster will present our experience and insight gained so far in this research and will showcase the proposed curriculum enhancement. More specifically, the poster will present the important BDCloud related topics and the breakdown of these topics among four core CS/IT courses. The poster will further identify the major challenges this intervention may encounter and will provide a deeper analysis of them. Finally, the poster will describe our experience of implementing one such course with proposed interventions during Fall of 2016 semester. The pre- post- test results that measure student opinion and understanding about big data and cloud computing topics will be presented in the poster which demonstrates improved student interest and learning.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): NSF Award #1600864
Faculty Advisor: None Listed,