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.
In this foundational course, students will learn to manage common services that are provided by IT Operations professionals. Students will be introduced to core principles of IT service management such as customer service orientation, continual service improvement, and a focus on meeting the needs of the business. Students will get hands on experience troubleshooting common IT problems. They will learn how to manage incidents, identify and address systematic problems, and manage changes in IT services. The course also gives learners practice writing change tickets and training customers how to use new technologies.
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 covers common IT concepts including the structure of typical IT departments and the roles of various IT professionals. Students will learn how an operating system interacts with applications on a device. Learners will be introduced to computer hardware and networks and will install peripherals such as printers. They will also learn foundational software development and database concepts. By the end of this course, students should use common IT best practices.
Customer Experience (CX) is a philosophy that makes the customer the focal point for all IT services. In this introductory-level course, students will get an overview of CX philosophies and processes, including the value delivery model. They will engage in role plays and simulations to provide customer service through responsiveness, tailored communication, and application of conflict management techniques. Students will apply user experience tools and a full design sprint to create a technology solution.
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.
This course covers core competencies required for IT Operations professionals. Students will determine the capacity and performance requirements for a technology, apply configuration standards, and use automation tools to manage daily IT operations activities. By the end of this course, they will be able to manage relationships with their suppliers, implement sustainability plans, and gather evidence for reports and audits.
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.
Students will learn how the framework of People, Process, and Technology supports IT services. This course reinforces and develops students’ communication skills through the writing of processes, procedures, training plans, and transition-to-production documents. Learners will conduct mock meetings with stakeholders, carry out in-person training, and develop a training video. By the end of the course, they will develop a comprehensive deployment plan for a new technology which includes the calculation of human resource requirements and required processes.
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.
Organizations have various methods of delivering IT services to internal and external customers. This course covers models such as DevOps (Development/Operations), agile service delivery, SecOps (Security/Operations), and SIAM (Service Integration and Management). Students will learn project management basics including agile and waterfall methodologies, gather requirements from customers, and provide requirements to a project team. Students will use innovation best practices to create a service solution improvement.
Organizations use the closely related practices of business continuity and disaster recovery to ensure that they can remain operational after a negative event. Students will learn how to contribute to, execute, test, and communicate plans for business continuity and disaster recovery. They will learn to create backups using different types of storage and to restore from a backup. The course covers the mapping of service dependencies and the standard processes that IT Operations professionals use to take down and recover systems.
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 IT operations 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.