Networking Education for the New Economy

Universities face two important challenges in educating the IT workers of tomorrow. First, aside from occasional economic downturns, the number of graduates in programs such as computer science and management information systems has been inadequate to meet worldwide industry demand. Second, teaching methods have been slow to evolve to meet the needs of students and employers in a modern knowledge society. These challenges are particularly difficult in specialized fields of IT that combine rapid technological change with growing industry demand, such as networking/telecommunications and electronic commerce. As part of an economic recovery process, organizations of all sizes typically increase their dependency on technology and electronic business transactions. Recovery means they will again be looking for qualified people to fill positions such as network managers, Web administrators, e-Commerce developers, and security specialists. This paper relates one university's experiences in addressing technical complexity by increasing the experiential learning component in each of their major courses, while still delivering a quality business education. A new major in Networking and Telecommunications was developed at Boise State University in the College of Business in 2000 that strives to combine a solid foundation in core business courses, the technical theory important to understanding complex networking environments, and handson experiences that reinforce theory and bring it to life. A cornerstone of the experiential learning approach is an upper division elective course that runs BSU.net, a fully functional Internet Service Provider, continuously operating since 1996. This non-traditional, semi-structured course gives students the opportunity to apply technical skills along with business decision- making related to the application of technology, and the real world requirement of supporting live customers. Additionally, the authors present a summary of the foundation literature on the benefits of experiential learning, highlight the efforts of other universities to include experiential learning in their curriculums, and offer a set of criteria for universities who seek answers to the challenges of offering a combined business and technical curriculum. With this challenging methodology, universities can attract students to technical programs and better prepare them with the education and experience to qualify for and succeed in rapidly changing technical posit