New Draft Information Science

From MWCSWiki

Here's what I (Karen Anewalt) think:

IS major:

   18 credit CPSC core: 220, 230, 321, 390, 3XX Database
   3 credits Intro to Information Science
   3 credits from (CPSC 326, Data Communication & Networks, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining)
   9 credit cognate (any 3 courses in a single discipline where at least 3 credits must be numbered 300 or above)
   3 credits CPSC elective
   3 credit Information Science capstone (research/projects type course with presentations)

prereqs:

    Math 125, Calc 1, Calc 2 (less than ideal but okay I guess)

39 credits total - 30 taught by the CPSC department

I think this is fairly respectable. Obviously they aren't getting all the CPSC that a traditional major would be getting, but they're only missing: 305, 401, 405 & linear algebra. I think that I can live with that. There's no way to support the Info Sys or Info Sci idea and still require the students to take ALL of the CPSC courses.

I looked at a variety of majors across campus and thought that for any of them I'd be happy with a cognate requiring 3 courses where at least one was 300 or above. I think that a 300 level course has at least some rigor to it regardless of the department that it's taught in. (I know there was some concern about the cognates being "light" depending on the department. For me requiring a 300 level is enough to give the cognate some substance.)

I included a capstone in this proposal. From informal face-to-face discussions, it sounded like everyone was at least moderately interested in having a capstone for all CPSC majors eventually (assuming that we could require >40 credits). Right now, I think that CPSC 401 is somewhat like a capstone in that it requires students to bring ideas together from all the different languages they've used and it requires them to do at least a small amount of research. I don't think that we need to call the info sci "capstone" course a capstone officially. Immediately we'd offer some course that has some Info Sys and Info Sci appropriate content and that requires students to make some connections. I don't know enough about Info Sci in general to make a good name for this new course. Any suggestions Stephen?

Connections between CPSC and IS would be made in the "Intro to Information Science" course & the capstone. I would like to see us offer an elective once a year that would help to make the connections as well. (Obviously the elective would be open to all CPSC majors, but would have a little bit of an IS flavor to it.) We already offer some of these types of courses, Ecommerce & Simulation for example.

In the immediate future, I don't think that the cognate courses would help to make connections but in the long run I would hope that this would change. If we build some fairly solid connections with other departments (BUAD, Philosophy, etc.), I would guess that the other departments would offer courses that would help to bring out the connections between the disciplines as well. Who knows what other departments may be interested in joining forces to go after one of the "new" positions this year or in the future. I think that Philosophy (and us) have a jump on the situation since we were turned down for replacement positions. It's pretty clear that all departments are going to have to play together in the future if they want to expand. This push from the administration should support our IS track provided that the other departments know that we're very interested in cross-discipline connections.

If all of the CPSC prereqs stayed as they are now, the IS students would also have to take Calc 1, Calc 2, and Discrete Math. I'd rather see an IS student take Math 200 Statistics or a Discrete Probability/Modeling course, but I could live with the Calcs instead for now. I think that some of the math modeling would be included in the "Intro to IS" course. Eventually, it would be great if we didn't require Calc 1 or 2 for the IS track and required a stats course and a modeling/probability course instead.

Our current 321 course wouldn't necessarily benefit an IS student a lot. If the course evolved into more of a traditional algorithms course, I think that it would be useful for IS. If we do switch from C++ to Java in the intros and 321 becomes the course were we teach C++, then I'd rather see the IS people take a second CPSC elective than take the C++ course.