On the heels of my post about looming employee issues and the drop in interest in computer sciences at HSU, Ars Technica has an article that addresses this very issue. It seems it’s not just here but universities everywhere are facing the the problem of dropping interest. The solution? What a surprise: Make the programs more interesting and relevant to today’s market!
I don’t know the details of what is taught at HSU, but looking through the class offerings in the Computer Science program I see no mention of open source web languages such as PHP, Ruby, Python. Maybe these things are taught, but if so, at least on a marketing level, there should be some acknowledgment of the revolution going on in the open source world and web application development in the program and course descriptions.
That’s encouraging. Maybe I missed that in their course descriptions. Or maybe they need to update the site. Overall the CS site reads pretty old school to me. I know the university is doing great things with some opens source tools like Moodle.
I know that the chair of the department teaches a Python course. She’s a big fan.