IT education

The relationship between academia and business is often a bit prickly - and never more so than in IT. The speed at which the industry moves can see pupils more knowledgeable than lecturers as to what's hot, what's not, and even what's right on the skills and technology front.

If surveys are correct, vendors and customers have become disillusioned with computer science graduates, regarding them as intelligent people who know nothing of value to the business.

Academics by turn often regard computer science as a classical subject and lambast the business demand for specific skills as an obsession with trivia, most of which will be out of date by the time the courses are completed.

Some of the leading vendors have taken matters into their own hands.

Like genetic engineers injecting chromosomes into organisms, they attempt to sway the brave new skills market by injecting product-specific material into degree courses. Some educational establishments, especially the more vocationally-oriented universities, have embraced such offers with open arms.

They have good reasons for doing so. First, their students prefer it because the skills and the accompanying certificates make them immediately employable. Second, it enables colleges to provide up-to-date teaching, overcoming the criticism that they are lagging behind industry. A third reason is that relevant software is often expensive and many colleges cannot afford it.

The counter-arguments are fairly obvious. One is that graduates emerge with a distorted view of the world, biased towards just a few vendors' technologies, and that they lack a fundamental understanding that would subsequently help them acquire specific skills. Robin Milner, head of the computing laboratory at Cambridge University, says: 'Today's fad can go out of fashion extraordinarily quickly. So if you lean towards particular methodologies or systems, they tend not to be a good basis for a whole career and professional development.'

Cambridge University has no intention of incorporating vendor-specific material within its degree courses, Milner adds, although he believes courses should be based on real products and technologies. 'It's important to have those examples. We want to abstract from the real world and ask what these examples have in common, not be separated from the real world.'

Roger Needham, managing director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge (who, incidentally, preceded Milner in his post), takes a similar line. 'I would regard including very specific stuff about specific systems in a degree course as a somewhat suspect thing to do, whether or not it was provided by a vendor,' he says.

'I would like computer science graduates to emerge thinking that Windows NT was a sensible way to compute, but I would be horrified if graduates emerged thinking NT was what an operating system is - just as I'm horrified if they think all operating systems are Unix.'

Both Needham and Milner imply that the influence of vendors should be confined to research, where their contribution and money are warmly welcomed.

However, Milner highlights the risks of dependency on too few vendors - colleges are exposed to funding cuts and relationships can quickly become incestuous.

'It's very important to have plural industrial funding,' said Milner.

'In any case, your value as a collaborator to industry is that you abstract from different vendor approaches.' That is best done by being involved with as many vendors as possible. Key research partners of Cambridge University include BT, Nortel Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, ICL and AT&T Laboratories.

A few large vendors seem to share this view, IBM being one. 'We've been involved in higher education for 50 years and we're taking the longer view,' says Ian Green, IBM manager of education in business for the EMEA region.

IBM does not intend to mix business with education and will confine its activities largely to donations and research. Another way of looking at it is that since IBM provides services in addition to software, it makes sense to recruit a lot of graduates and do more education in-house.

But recent arrivals at the high table of IT are likely to eschew IBM's purist line. Microsoft is furthest ahead at this new game of injecting its software into as many curricula as possible. The vendor has a twin programme, one part being to recruit universities or colleges to deliver courses leading to Microsoft-certified qualifications, the other being to persuade them to incorporate material within their existing generic degree courses.

Institutions in the first category are called AATPs (authorised academic training partners) and their numbers are growing fast. AATPs increased from 30 to 100 in the six months to February this year and Microsoft expects the figure to double to 200 within a year.

The second part of the programme, called GRASP (graduate recruitment academic specialist programme), is at an earlier trial stage and involves just two UK universities at present.

GRASP is the more controversial of the two programmes because it involves incorporation of Microsoft training modules into existing generic degree courses. But according to Leslie Beddie, head of the computing school at Napier University in Edinburgh - one of the two trial GRASP members - the inclusion of Microsoft course material reflects not just what employers want these days, but also what the students want.

'Computing is a practical subject and you go in because you want to use the technology,' says Beddie.

Beddie insists the integrity of Napier's computer science course has not been compromised by inclusion of the Microsoft material. 'We only incorporate those Microsoft modules that are closest to the ones on our degree programme,' he says. 'There is a threshold that you mustn't cross and that's why GRASP is so good for us, because there's no attempt by Microsoft to insist you put particular modules in the programme.'

Napier incorporated 60% of the modules of the MCP (Microsoft certified professional) programme into its degree course, including the SQL module for database access. 'The SQL module was related to our general database module anyway,' argues Beddie. 'The only difference is that we would look at all the background to databases, while Microsoft would look at the implementation specifics of its SQL.'

Passing the Napier degree does not automatically enable students to qualify as MCSEs (Microsoft certified systems engineers) because they have not taken all the courses or passed the relevant exams. However, students are invited to complete the remaining 40% of the MCP course via self-study and then to take the MCSE exams as well as their normal degree.

Microsoft UK education group manager Mark East says: 'Starting in July 1999, we'll be looking to widen out the whole programme.'

GRASP could evolve in such a way that students gain the Microsoft certifications automatically and emerge with the letters MCSE to place alongside their degree. Since surveys indicate that vendor certificates are often better regarded, this makes a lot of sense for students.

In fact, GRASP partners are not bound by any exclusive agreement to use just Microsoft material and Napier is considering including material from other vendors in its degree course. Cisco is a likely candidate in the networking arena. Key vendors are likely to compete strongly to be featured in this way because of the spin-offs both in marketing and in turning out graduates familiar with their products.

Bob Lewis, head of Cisco's European training academy programme, says: 'As far as we're concerned, there's a network skills shortage that's getting worse and this is one way of addressing it.'

Cisco has almost as much courseware incorporated by universities as Microsoft, with Wolverhampton University and the University of Central England among early takers. Students emerge with the Cisco CCIE (Cisco certified internetworking engineer) alongside their degree. Lewis says the courseware is proving popular not just because of the company's predominant position in networking systems, but because the material is relatively generic.

'When students do their hands-on, they use Cisco kit. But the skills acquired transfer readily to other vendors' kit,' says Lewis. He likens running a network to driving a car - you learn on a particular model but can readily adapt to any other.

3Com, Cisco's closest competitor in networking systems, has been a little slower off the mark, but 3Com UK education manager Mike Plested thinks the company will move in a similar direction. Its relationship with universities is largely confined to training roadshows, focusing on core technologies such as ATM and voice-over-IP rather than specific products. 3Com products are used for the hands-on part of these informal courses. Says Plested: 'The hope is that students will be more familiar with 3 Com kit when they leave university.'

Nothing wrong with that. But of more dubious virtue is the approach taken by vendors that attempt to monopolise college courses by exploiting the need for up-to-date course materials and the lack of funds to pay for them. Such was the experience of David Grimshaw, now a senior lecturer at the Cranfield Institute of Management.

Grimshaw believes vendor involvement in courses can only be justified when a number of companies are involved. Yet in his previous position at Leeds University, the lecturer found that his hand was forced by a funding crisis.

Grimshaw was running a course on geographical information systems (GIS) software and needed products for students to work on. 'The software is quite expensive - about #&163;1,000 a seat - and if we were trying to provide it for 40 students it would be costly,' he says. There were relatively few vendors in the field and only one was willing to donate the software.

'The company insisted on a monopolistic arrangement, which wasn't ideal, but given the funding position was liveable with,' winces Grimshaw. 'What I did was use the package as a medium for teaching the principles.'

The teaching would have been easier had products been available from at least two vendors, enabling students to contrast the approaches and evaluate the pros and cons.

The only conclusion can be that there is room - indeed a need - for both types of degree course, with vendors' material featuring at the more vocationally oriented institutions, while a strict vendor-free zone is maintained at the more academic, research-based universities such as Cambridge.

However, Microsoft's East believes even some of the academic universities may come under pressure from students opting for courses that give them vendor certifications in addition to their degree. But we know the relationship between supply and demand is always going to be at least a little prickly.