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Integration of the Cisco Networking Academy at a Four-Year University

Shelton Houston, Steven Blesse, and Christopher Herrod The University of Southern Mississippi

Background

The Information Technology (IT) program at The University of Southern Mississippi began as a transfer option for community college students majoring in computer programming technology. When implemented this option satisfied resource constraints of space, funding, and faculty. For the first two years, the option worked in that the degree offered was interdisciplinary with major courses provided by computer science and business. The only expenditure was faculty advisor time for less than fifty majors. This degree option might have continued, but a program accreditation visit required curriculum changes and a separate degree program. An application for a new degree program was approved in 1997. The concept was to offer the degree as an interdisciplinary program with most of the required courses taken from different academic units within the university, e.g. computer science and business.

The interdisciplinary program would have been implemented; however, a proposal to establish an articulated degree program was approved by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Because of budget constraints and the difficulty of having a new degree program approved by the state governing board, university administration decided to utilize the approved interdisciplinary program to develop the new degree program. As a subcontract of NSF grant number DUE- 9950085, the university received funds to develop a four-year articulated curriculum in computer networking. This funding provided the justification to acquire laboratory space, faculty, and equipment that would not have been available otherwise.

Program Development

To articulate the community college curriculum, a faculty committee compared published course outcomes to develop equivalent courses offered by the university. Table 1 shows the original list of courses identified as transferable into the four-year degree. Of the 15 courses identified, nine had academic equivalents already in place leaving six courses to be created. The content areas for these courses were system maintenance, data communications, network components, network planning & design, project management, and operating platforms. These courses were created along with 13 other courses to complete the four-year curriculum.

Collectively, the courses offered a two-course sequence in computer architecture & maintenance, a four-course sequence in local area networking, a four-course sequence in wide area networking, a five-course sequence in Windows client-server networking, a two-course sequence in open source client-server networking, and a two-course senior capstone sequence.

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Houston, S., & Herrod, C., & Blesse, S. (2005, June), Integration Of The Cisco Networking Academy Curriculum At A Four Year University Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14826