Networking Education for the New Economy

Introduction The demand for qualified IT workers rose steadily over the last decade and is likely to become strong again as the global economy recovers from the current recession. Two specific areas where demand for talent has been consistently growing are those of networking/telecommunications and e-Commerce. This demand is a worldwide phenomenon, with technology-based regions such as Southeast Asia banding together to form a National Information Infrastructure plan (Bui, 1997). Organizations of all sizes are increasing their dependency on technology and electronic transactions, moving toward what Straub and Watson (2001) call the network-enabled organization (NEO). The infrastructure that supports this trend requires technical talent to fill positions such as network managers, Web administrators, e-Commerce developers, and security specialists. Universities, on the other hand, face important challenges in educating the IT workers of tomorrow in these highly technical fields. Even with increasing enrollments, the number of graduates in computer science and information systems has been inadequate to meet worldwide industry demand (West and Bogumil, 2001), and our teaching methods have not evolved to meet the needs of students and employers in these rapidly changing technical fields (Laurillard, 2002). We face additional challenges in curriculum design with the changing student population. Stein and Craig (2000) note that the "dot.com generation" enters the university with an intensive education in technology (p.220). Their experiences in Australian universities reveal that incoming students exhibit increased computer knowledge, have more confidence in their skills, and use IT applications more extensively than prior generations (Stein and Craig, 2000). Boise State University, located in a growing high-tech area of the U.S., has embarked on a program to meet these challenges that might be used as a model for other universities or university-industry partnerships. To enhance our business curriculum and better meet industry demand we developed and implemented a new degree program in Networking and Telecommunications (NTCOMM) in the spring of 2000. Housed in a College of Business, but with a technical emphasis, the program's goal is to produce graduates who are not only technically proficient, but who understand the diverse business functions and organizational drivers that dictate technical solutions. The program builds upon and extends the value of a traditional university education. To address the problem of teaching methods not meeting the needs of students and employers, we created a dynamic learning environment that integrates theory with practice and supports technical concepts with hands-on experience. Designed to maximize the hands-on experience, all NTCOMM classes at BSU are taught in our new Networking and Telecommunications Teaching Lab, sponsored in part by a grant from the Micron Technology Foundation. Thirty individual PCs with flat-screen monitors, dozens of project systems with swappable hard drives, rack-mounted class servers, and a large collection of network devices and management systems give students many opportunities to learn the application of technology along with the theory. A cornerstone of the experiential learning approach is an upper division elective that runs BSU.net, a fully functional Internet Service Provider business, continuously operating since 1996 (Minch and Tabor, 2001). In the following sections we will frame problems of networking education and training in industry and universities, describe our approach for addressing the problems, and summarize the benefits we have realized. While discussing our approach, we will propose a set of desirable success criteria and measure our efforts against those criteria. Significant emphasis will be placed on our use of techniques that marry business and technical topics, as well as conceptual and hands-on activities. …