Ict curricula Guidelines (2nd draft)

Systems Thinking & Learning
by Andreas Kaiser, ISEN, Lille, France
Member of the Career Space Curriculum Guidelines Working Group
Today young graduate recruits have to integrate into teams working on very complex systems with close interaction and interdependence of various system components and aspects. This makes it ever more necessary to develop "systems skills" as part of the curriculum, as these skills are essential to the professional success.
Traditionally the educational focus was on the development of the capacity of abstraction by teaching mathematics. This approach has two limitations: on the one hand, the overall aim of increasing the numbers of graduates in the ICT field is incompatible with a "selection process" based on mathematics, which is more and more frequently rejected as a discipline by the young generation. On the other hand, capacity of abstraction (ability to do abstract thinking) alone is not sufficient.
"System skills" include the ability to analyse, represent, partition systems, to isolate problems as well as problem solving. This is “systems thinking”. These systems skills are closely linked to "behavioural skills" such as teamwork, personal communication, problem formulation, information retrieval etc, as no single person can master all aspects of very the complex systems common in the ICT industry today.
Today these "system skills" do not explicitly appear on university curricula. They are mostly hidden or imbedded in activities such as projects and are not necessarily explicitly evaluated or examined. Furthermore, there is a lack of teaching tools to help students to acquire these skills. Consequently "system skills" are a challenge to universities as they need to develop new teaching and evaluation methods, and introduce such teaching in years 1 & 2 of higher education ICT courses.