With the world of technology changing constantly, it is difficult for universities to keep producing IT graduates that are sufficiently up-to-date with the latest trends. However, this is where American University in Dubai excels, according to the associate dean of its school of engineering, Khalid Khawaja.
Trends and buzzwords come and go in IT at a rapid pace. It is hard enough for organisations to keep up with them, which makes it even more important to them that the graduates they hire are well-tuned in these areas.
However, it is even more important for universities, which are only able to refresh and change their IT programmes once a year. Therefore when that time does come around, it is imperative they get it right.
Khalid Khawaja, associate dean of the school of engineering at American University in Dubai (AUD), says keeping AUD’s IT programme closely knitted with the wants and needs of the IT industry is core to what they do.
“We always look at what’s going on in the IT industry around us and inject that into the curriculum. While we do teach the basics in things like networking, database, security and programming, we are also sensitive to the fact that things like mobile computing are very prominent, so we actually have courses that teach these things and link them into the big picture,” Khawaja says.
To keep up with the trends, Khawaja says AUD has a continuous improvement process and he believes the university is the only in the region that does it that way.
“We measure all the time and use very effective tools in measurement. We use software tools to link everything to our learning outcomes, but then we actually sit down and look at these and see how we can change the curriculum in order to meet things that we weren’t able to meet. We have spent a lot of time in creating this continuous improvement formula – it’s a cycle, not a one-way thing. It’s one of the things we always have to demonstrate and be very systematic about,” he says.
Relevance
The relevance of the IT programme to the industry is also something AUD keeps in mind when hiring its academic staff.
“When we hire staff we monitor how they are linked to the industry and have activity within the research field, because when they do that they can see the changes in the market place. Every once in a while when we’re not meeting a particular learning outcome they can observe that it’s because of a new trend that we should be incorporating into the programme to meet our objectives better,” Khawaja says.
AUD’s IT department also has an advisory board composed of prominent members in the IT industry, who meet regularly with the staff and give advice.
The result of these efforts is a curriculum that is the closest in the region to what the industry is looking for, according to Khawaja.
“I don’t know any other programme that teaches java at the level that we do. All the other curriculums I have seen are just at the programming level. Our students have a full course on enterprise computing with java. For an IT programme, we dive a lot deeper than other curriculums in the region,” he says.
AUD’s IT programme is also one of the few in the region that is accredited by ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology), which is the recognised U.S. accreditor of university programmes in applied science, engineering and technology.
“When you are ABET accredited there are certain criteria that you have to satisfy and we satisfy all of them. In terms of preparation and then the skills that they acquire afterwards, we make sure that we do it up to these standards,” Khawaja says.
It’s this accreditation that also allows AUD to stay ahead of the IT game in the Middle East, according to Khawaja.
“Computing is a very tough field to stay up-to-date with compared with other fields so this is a major challenge for us and I think being updated is a key challenge. This has ramifications in terms of faculty qualifications, resources and curriculum, and we always plan to stay up to date and make sure our students are graduating with whatever they need to be successful,” Khawaja says.
“If you don’t understand the enterprise computing basics that are core to things like cloud computing, big data and virtualisation, there’s no way that you can get into that market. Sometimes you can integrate these trends into an existing course and sometimes they become their own module, like mobility and big data has done for us,” he adds.
Enterprise
AUD has offered an IT programme since 1999, but when Khawaja joined in 2005 it was very vendor specific with no enterprise components, he says.
“It was very clear to us that enterprise computing was becoming the central area for bringing all the IT things together. Security is no longer an isolated thing – it is now something linked to enterprise computing. All things like networking, database, programming and mobile are now meeting at that enterprise level and it’s not acceptable to graduate students who are not very well rehearsed in that area. You don’t see an application or computing formula that’s not enterprise-enabled these days,” he says.
He adds that the work they put in to enterprise-enabling the programme is evident in the students it graduates, who exhibit a deep knowledge of what enterprise computing is.
“They can work on Java and .NET framework, they know what integration problems are, they have knowledge of mobile programming and how to link it into an enterprise system, they know what design patterns are, they take software engineering courses, and they understand how to interact with clients and create proposals that link to this enterprise computing formula. This was all created from 2005 onwards to react to what’s happening in the market place,” Khawaja says.
Like any successful university and programme, it is AUD’s IT graduates who represent the value of the teaching.
“We expect our students to really succeed in the IT field after we equip them with all the skills and knowledge that will allow them to do so. We do actually follow our graduates and over the years we are finding that we are meeting these objectives. We have students who have become very successful managers in the IT field and very successful software engineers and developers,” Khawaja says.
As a university that prides itself in avidly following the changes in the IT industry and applying it to its programme, AUD is now initiating changes of its own.
New programme
The new semester in September will see the inauguration of AUD’s computer science programme within its school of engineering. The new programme will replace the previous IT course.
With its IT students previously being made up predominantly of international students, a contract with the ICT fund will now provide 30 scholarships for UAE nationals, who will for the first time outweigh the intentional quota.
“The computer science programme will involve more solid preparation in terms of mathematics and we really think that for a solid computer programme this helps the whole formula a lot better than just an IT programme. It’s a good direction for us,” Khawaja says.
That is not the only change going on at AUD this coming semester. Internships, which were previously optional in the IT programme, will be a requirement in the new computer science programme.
“This shows how much we value internships. Internships are fundamental to our programme and how we progress. We have a career services office that helps our students land internships and land jobs after graduating. The internships are full summer placements with a specified amount of hours,” Khawaja says.
“A student is assigned to a professor and they have to communicate with the professor and attend a certain amount of lectures as they do their internship. Then they have to write reports on what they have accomplished in their internship, so we do monitor them and make sure they meet their objectives,” he adds.
Much of the general feedback of university IT programmes from organisations often centre on the heavy academic slant of learning and lack of practical training.
However, along with the now compulsory internships, Khawaja also points to the Capstone Project as a very core and practical part of AUD’s IT curriculum.
“I’ve personally taught some of these capstones and one of the requirements is how industrial your ID is and how successful it can be. Students have created games and applications and some have been quite successful in the market place,” he says.
“For example, last year I had a group of students who created an application on the BlackBerry and they got a couple of thousand downloads within two weeks of releasing it. They now have around 17,000 downloads. All three members of the group are now in full time employment but keep in constant contact to improve the app,” he concludes.
