Randy Connolly Blog

Alberta’s Minister of Advanced Education and Technology, Doug Horner, has introduced draft legislation to amend the provincial Post-Secondary Learning Act, which if approved, would allow Mount Royal College (where I teach) to apply to use “university” in its name.

More details about the proposed amendment can be found on the Government of Alberta’s Advanced Education and Technology website at www.advancededandtech.alberta.ca/reading/policy/roleframework/

Work

As the title suggests, applications for our new Bachelor of Computer Information Systems degree (4 year) have been quite encouraging. Compared to this time last year, we have received over 60% more applications from prospective students. This improvement could be due to three reasons:

1. prospective students want a four year credential
2. prospective students like the curriculum in the new degree
3. renewed interest in computer fields after six or seven lean years.

However, given that applications for our computer science university transfer program have not improved, many of us think it is more likely that the first two reasons explain the massive increase.

Teaching, Work

Today we received news that Doug Horner, Minister of Advanced Education and Technology for the Alberta government has received the recommendation of the Campus Alberta Quality Council and has approved our proposal to offer a bachelor of Computer Information Systems starting September 2009. We now have to go through the process of getting the degree approved by the college’s General Faculty Council.

As the coordinator for our program, I have been heavily involved with the development of the curriculum for this degree. The new degree is mainly based on the ACM IT model curriculum.

Teaching, Work

As mentioned in an earlier post, one of the problems that our department has struggled with over the past seven or eight years is the massive decline in student enrolments in our Computer Information Systems applied degreee and our Computer Science university transfer program. This year for the College’s Open House for new students, I put together a series of posters that tried to put a friendlier spin on our two programs.

Aware that potental students often hold a series of very negative stereotypes about the CS/CIS profession, I tried to make the posters focus on a few atttractive ideas about what benefits a CS/CIS career can bring a student. These posters were then tacked up in our booth.

[View with PicLens]

Work

One of the problems that our department has struggled with over the past seven or eight years is the massive decline in student enrolments in our Computer Information Systems applied degreee and our Computer Science university transfer program. Since the height of the dot com boom in 2000, are numbers have declined by about 75%, or about 50% in comparision to our pre-boom numbers of the mid 1990s. One of the consequences of this drop in student numbers is that we’ve had to make our first-year courses easier in order to maintain enough numbers to make a viable third-year cohort.

The Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada has recently released a report which describes and assesses these recent trends in computer science in Canadian universities and finds that a similar drop occurred at pretty much every college and university in Canada. The report examines five frequently-suggested explanations for this decline: public perceptions surrounding the dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2002, and parental and student perceptions about likely employment opportunities; public perceptions and lack of understanding about the field of computer science as it is today; the failure of many university computer science programs to adapt to changed circumstances; the ubiquity of computers, so that general purpose computing is now, literally, commonplace; and deficiencies in the high-school environments in the preparation of students for IT education and careers.

You can view this report youself: Outlook on IT enrolments.pdf (4.49 mb)

Teaching, Work

This summer and fall I’ve been doing some contract programming work in Windows Forms on the side. One of the most enjoyable parts of this particular contract has been working with both the Compact .NET Framework as well as Microsoft’s Virtual Earth control. In one part of this particular contract, I’ve been creating a Windows Forms application that needs to allow a user to display and edit GPS coordinates of house addresses. To do so, I used the Windows Form’s WebBrowser control, and then programmatically loaded an HTML document that contained the Javascript for displaying the appropriate map as well as markers for the original GPS coordinates. The slick part of this whole process is that you can send messages back and forth between the C# Windows Forms container and the Javascript in the document being displayed within the embedded browser.

At any rate, I’ve included a few sample screenshots to illustrate how it turned out.

[View with PicLens]

Programming, Work