Implementing the IT-Transfer2020 Curriculum Guidance for Two-Year IT Transfer Programs

Baccalaureate IT programs are revisiting their curriculum in response to the ACM/IEEE IT curricular recommendations in the IT2017 report. Consequently, two-year colleges will likely need to update their lower division IT transfer programs as well. IT-Transfer2020 uses the same methodology of competencies as IT2017 and IT2yr2014, and it organizes its 27 essential and 29 supplemental competencies within the ten essential and nine supplemental IT competency domains defined in IT2017. IT-Transfer2020 includes an analysis of congruence between its competencies and the IT2yr2014 learning outcomes to assist institutions looking to offer both transfer and applied two-year IT programs with structuring their course offerings. Two-year programs which follow either IT-Transfer2020 or IT2yr2014 are substantially congruent and would likely only need to differ by one or two courses to prepare students for entry-level positions after two years of study or analyst-level positions upon earning a bachelor's degree. IT-Transfer2020 echoes the IT2017 recommendations regarding mathematics and science content and contains an IT Transfer Articulation Worksheet to facilitate communication between transfer partner institutions as well as assessment rubrics to help with continuous assessment of an IT transfer program's quality. The ACM Committee for Computing Education in Community Colleges invites institutions to highlight their IT transfer program by submitting a program example at ccecc.acm.org/correlations.