Information Systems Curricula in the UK: A Survey of Undergraduate Courses (Research-in-Progress)

For the most part of the current decade academia and industry have been reporting decreasing numbers of Information Systems (IS) undergraduate students and IS graduate professionals respectively. Among the possible explanations offered, a number of researchers have argued that ageing IS undergraduate curricula are partly to blame for the demise of the discipline. As a first step, the authors of this work have set out to classify existing IS curricula offered by UK universities to enable further research around the areas of curriculum development, skills and pedagogy. The study uses the IS Body of Knowledge (BoK) descriptors which are part of the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency1 (QAA) Subject Benchmark Statement for Computing (SBSC). The results of the study are supplemented by data about course entry requirements, course naming conventions and course accreditation by the British Computer Society (BCS). It is hoped that IS academics, curriculum developers and IS practitioners will benefit from gaining a better understanding of what IS students are expected to know when they graduate.