The faculty and the Curriculum Committee of the School have formalized details of the new SI curriculum. The new curriculum has been approved by the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the new curriculum plan affected the incoming class in fall 1997. The information presented below is for historical purposes to help show the process that went into developing the new school.
Draft Curriculum Report
Summer 1996
Important Note: The content below is presented for historical purposes to show the progression of the planning for the new school curriculum. As noted above, the faculty and Curriculum Committee are now making final revisions to the new, proposed curriculum. Certain elements of the summer 1996 plan (below) may be kept while others may be changed substantially.
Faculty split into working groups of between three and 15 people to develop curriculum plans for each of these six specializations. CVG organized two day-long faculty retreats to facilitate sharing across working groups and address the many difficult issues that emerged in the course of developing a new curriculum and building a new school composed of faculty from several different disciplines.
Figure 1. Vision of Our New Curriculum.
Six specializations are proposed at this time. Names of specific specializations, and their content, may change as discussions among task forces continue.
Students entering the school will come from a variety of academic backgrounds and possess varying levels of technical expertise, analytical skills, and knowledge of local information infrastructures. We propose to offer introductory workshops for students who do not enter the new program with the requisite skills and knowledge expected of incoming students.
During their first semester of enrollment, all incoming students will be required to take an estimated nine to twelve credits of core curriculum. The size of the incoming class and personal constraints imposed on students because of funding, current employment, and personal obligations may require us to offer the core curriculum in different forms to accommodate student needs.
Coursework beyond the core curriculum will be divided into six specializations each of which might have its own requirements. Students' progression through the program could be a very clear, calculated progression of courses from introductory workshops, through megacore, through prerequisites, through required courses in one or more specializations (figure 2).
Figure 2. Clear-cut progression from course to course
In actual practice, the deployment of our core might be much more ragged, less deliberate. Figure 3 tries to depict this ragged situation. Darkened circles are "core" or "required" courses, light circles are courses that are suggested for the particular specialization. Students in different specializations would take some of the same core and suggested courses.
Figure 3. "Ragged" progression through core and elective courses
Task forces charged with curriculum planning connected with each of the specializations are not only making recommendations concerning content within their track but they have also made recommendations concerning the core's content and form(s). In January 1996, an interdisciplinary task force composed of four faculty (Judy Olson, chair; William Birmingham, Karen Drabenstott, and Jeff MacKie-Mason) began developing a new core curriculum and took up these recommendations, paying special attention to topics that none of the specializations identified but topics that students should know, e.g., evaluation methods, statistics, management. This faculty group will offer the new school's first interdisciplinary nine-credit core course named "Foundations" in fall semester 1996. This course is not required for incoming master's- and doctoral-level students but is highly recommended.
At the same time, specialization task forces are continuing their deliberations aimed at developing curriculum plans for the six specializations. They are focusing on:
While we have tried to be inclusive regarding our definition of specializations in the new curriculum, we may add new specializations in the near future, or consolidate, restructure, or redefine the six specializations that we have identified to date. Somewhat later in our planning, we also need to address evaluation, continual revision, and refreshing of established tracks to ensure that our program remains viable and sensitive to the lightning-swift changes in information technology.