A Framework towards Assessing the Merits of Inviting IT Professionals to the Classroom

Abstract

Executive Summary For the past years, the academic IT profession through various professional society curriculum committees and accreditation bodies has made considerable progress to revise and update IT cur-ricula to meet the changing needs of the profession. In particular, learning techniques, beyond classroom teaching activities, have been recognized as essential ingredients to enhance the learning outcomes of advanced-level IT courses. This study outlines an assessment framework to explore the merits of inviting IT professionals as a pedagogical technique to integrate real world IT experience into the classroom. Though the general merits of inviting guest speakers have been confirmed in many previous (non-IT related) studies, these events are particularly much needed in the IT field. This urgency is justified by many factors such as the complex and constantly changing IT profession and its environment, the rapid pace in the rollout/phase-out of IT technologies and terminologies, and the shallow focus on professional orientation in most IT curricula. Our study confirms some of the merits of inviting guest speakers as reported in the literature. It also adds to existing literature in at least three aspects. First, to our best knowledge, this is the first reported study that reflects upon the usage of guest speakers in IT classrooms. Second, our research is a first initiative that contributes to establishing a formal framework for the planning and the assessment of guest speaker events. Such an assessment framework will be very useful for continuous improvement to ensure that students will not feel cheated that three hours of class-time lecturing and discussions were devoted to a less worthwhile guest speaker talk. Third, compared to previous studies, the experience reported in this article is unique in the sense that it is formally and strategically planned, conducted on a large (university-wide) scale and scheduled during a particular week near the end of each semester. Based on the proposed assessment framework and research methodology, this research makes use of multiple sources of evidence to assess the merits of guest speaker events. The data collected indicate that the event helps remedy the lack of exposure of information technology students to the IT professional environment. The event can also provide students with invaluable real-world and practical IT knowledge. Such knowledge can either relate to a particular topic already covered by the course, or it can bring new practical perspectives which are not covered by the course syllabus. These perspectives, along with the guest speaker recommendations , can be fed-back into the IT courses to enrich their content and/or scope. Such feedback is more important than ever given the rapidly evolving nature of the IT environment. This study 82 also revealed that, in our case, the event did not contribute much towards exposing students to ethical and/or cultural issues related to the workplace. The authors believe that this shortcoming could be addressed by sharing with guest speakers the event's objectives and requesting their support to achieve them. Our research also underlines the need for formal frameworks to assess the learning outcomes of guest speaker events. Event objectives, performance criteria and measurement indicators should be clearly defined. Careful planning, judicious implementation, based on best practices, and thorough assessment are some basic ingredients for successful guest speaker events. These requirements need to be integrated in the overall assessment strategy of the program curriculum. The assessment tools and research methods presented in this study can be very useful for IT faculty planning to conduct similar guest speaker events in future. Future research could focus on refining the event's assessment criteria by incorporating the objectives outlined in the various IT professional curriculum reports. Similar studies can also be conducted to confirm whether the findings of this study still hold in other institutions.