Everyone communicates, but are they doing it well? Communicative competence takes practice and self-awareness. By developing their communication skills, the student will improve their interpersonal ability, intercultural competence, and digital fluency to prepare the student for success in the workplace. In Communication Strategies, the student will learn through discovery and project-based activities to practice approaching situations critically and collaboratively. The strategies the student will gain in this course will be useful throughout their program and in their chosen industry.
This course reinforces the communication strategies practiced in COMM-1173 to provide students with the communication skills needed to apply for, stay in, and progress in the world of work. Students will further develop their interpersonal skills and digital fluency by seeking college, industry and community supports. Additionally, they will apply speaking, writing, and collaboration strategies to getting the job, adjusting to the job, and developing long-term career goals. Communication for the Workplace is a creative and active learning opportunity to set students apart in today’s competitive job market.
Students will build on the skills they practiced in Communication Strategies by focusing on the information technology sector. Students will develop their ability to think at a systems level by analyzing problems to come up with innovative solutions. Learners will collaborate to manage, analyze, and communicate information to various audiences across different channels. This collaboration will involve active listening, networking, and persuasion strategies in an information technology context.
IT solutions exist in order to meet business needs. In this course, students will learn foundational principles of IT architecture and design. They will learn how to interpret architectures and Detailed IT Design (DID) documents IT architects and engineers create and how to map the dependencies between infrastructures. Learners will also apply these architecture and design principles to create a simple IT solution.
This course provides students with an introduction to computer programming for the purpose of developing business software. Students will learn how to write, test, modify, and debug short programs. They will also analyze existing code to fix errors, collaborate, and re-use code ethically. Students will consider user experiences when creating software to address a business problem.
The perspectives of customers and users are central to good software development. This course introduces students to customer experience philosophies and processes, including the value delivery model. Students will also learn fundamental methods and tools to generate solutions for users. They will carry out a journey mapping process, create personas, write user stories, interpret wireframes to create a simple prototype, and conduct user testing. Digital accessibility will be also introduced.
In this foundational course, students will learn about computer hardware, operating systems, internet technologies, networks, servers, cloud computing, and web browsers. They will practice troubleshooting to resolve technology problems. Students will use system terminal commands and scripts to set up, configure, and automate commonly performed tasks. Students will follow best practices for basic IT security including methods of backing up data.
People who develop and maintain software provide a service to a business and its customers. This course provides a broader context for the core activity of developing software. Students will use structured methods of the IT service management (ITSM) framework to resolve incidents, manage problems, plan for changes, and use knowledge bases. The software development life cycle will provide students with context for the activities of developers and other IT professionals, including design, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
Software developers benefit from learning the basics of computer networking to understand how software interacts with various parts of a network. This course covers the skills and tools used to visualize networks, identify and troubleshoot blocks in connections, and address application vulnerabilities. Students will learn to interpret application dependency maps and host an application on a server.
Iterative Design Thinking is used to create innovative solutions to real-world problems. Students will develop their ability to empathize with users, challenge assumptions, and re-define problems. They will also work in teams to develop and test prototypes and hone their presentation skills by pitching solutions. This course will develop students’ ability to innovate and continually improve.
This is a data-focused course to develop confidence with quick data handling, parsing, structuring, and manipulating datasets for various database types. By viewing, understanding, and normalizing datasets, students will produce Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and other visual data schemas. Students will learn basic Structured Query Language (SQL) and NoSQL (not only SQL) data types, key-value pairs, and document stores. Students will develop basic to advanced commands including complex JOINs, advanced mathematical and string functions, and full-text search indexing functions. Students will tune the performance and execution times of queries using common practices of indexing and de-normalization.
In this course, students will be introduced to the fields of Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) and how they are used in real business applications. Students will get an introduction to the industry standard tools and technologies used in this field and learn definitions and meanings of common terms. They will analyze real case studies of how industry has applied the tools of DSML to improve their performance. By the end of this course, students will be able to contrast how DSML tools have impacted performance metrics in industry, compared to conventionally used methods.
IT Service Desk professionals provide support to both internal and external customers, sometimes by troubleshooting problems themselves, but otherwise by knowing who can address the issue. Students will reinforce the troubleshooting and customer experience skills developed in previous courses and use knowledge base articles to manage incidents and to solve problems. They will be able to support identity and access management processes; configure end-point solutions such as laptops, mobile devices, and cloud-based platforms; and contribute to Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs). Throughout this course, learners will apply the customer service model and further develop specific communication skills such as positive messaging during stressful events.
Information security skills are important for all IT professionals. Students will conduct security assessments, implement solutions, use software to monitor threats, and respond to specific events. The course covers standard security processes for containing threats. Students will learn to operate with an awareness of relevant laws and policies and demonstrate ethical reasoning. Learners will gain familiarity with security terminology and principles.
Organizations increasingly rely on cloud services for their operations. This course covers an overview of the architecture, implementation and delivery of cloud technologies including networks, databases, storage and compute services. Students will identify the cloud infrastructure required for specific IT services. They will also configure, deploy and maintain a cloud service as part of a comprehensive project. This course prepares students for the AWS certified Cloud Practitioner Foundational certification exam.
Students will learn fundamental skills for front-end development including writing code to structure a web page and applying design and accessibility standards to a web page. Students add interactivity to web pages and connect an application programming interface (API) to retrieve data from an external source. Students will also use a version control system to maintain their code. They will also review code using both automated tests and peer reviews.
In this course, students will learn the basics of analyzing data by using a programming language and related tools. The course introduces data science and machine learning and their uses in business applications. Students will use tools to import and prepare data for analysis. They will learn to visualize and interpret data and apply basic regression techniques. Students will work in groups on case studies using real life data sets.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the collective network of technologies used to connect and manage physical devices. In this course, students will build functional IoT projects and control and monitor them using a programming language and framework. Students will also rapidly develop applications on a mobile device to control physical devices.
This course deepens programming skills covered in the Software Development Fundamentals course. Students will be introduced to data types and structures, scope, algorithms, design patterns, unit testing, user documentation and other core concepts. Students will integrate more sophisticated programming ideas into their projects to align with modern industry practices.
This course involves setting up a back-end environment for a website or application, creating a local server instance and connecting to a database. This work will be done collaboratively using a version control system. This course also covers the creation of an application programming interface (API) and supporting documentation based on REST architecture. Students will use code to set and manage routes in the API, handle responses, perform tests, authenticate users and process user input. They will also learn to securely manage the connection and configuration information.
In this course, students will be introduced to cloud platforms and will set up a cloud service based on an architecture diagram. Students will also develop an interactive application in the cloud which connects to a serverless backend, an application programming interface (API) gateway, and a database. This work will be done in teams using an agile workflow to ensure code is tested for syntax, accessibility, and security and continuously integrated.
Students will have the opportunity to further refine their skills learned from other courses by designing and developing an e-commerce system using a programming language and associated framework. Coverage will also be given to server configuration, application deployment, source control and other contemporary web development topics.
Students will learn how to connect business applications by using industry standard application programming interfaces (APIs). Both standalone and cloud APIs will be explored to give students a broad toolkit that can be used to develop useful bridge applications to improve business productivity.
Co-operative education integrates related on-the-job experience with classroom theory by incorporating a term of paid or unpaid employment in the final term of the program. Students are given the opportunity to practice and apply the skills gained during the academic semesters of their program as productive full-time employees on their work term. Student performance will be monitored and evaluated by both the department and the employer.
The Industry Project provides real world experience in applying software design and delivery skills to a project requiring cross-functional teamwork. Project teams will work jointly with industry partners at the ACE Project Space facility. Each project team will evaluate, analyze, plan, research, model, design, document, develop, test, and manage a project. This option provides practice to further develop interpersonal, verbal, and written communication through teamwork and collaboration with project stakeholders. All team members will enhance their critical thinking, problem solving, research, independence, and life-long learning skills.