About the Department

In our country as well, to create fundamental and logical changes and to attain a reliable and skilled workforce in the field of Information Technology, concentrated and non-concentrated disciplines are being provided in higher education institutions, including universities.  

Information technology is considered a sub-disciplinary discipline in the technical and engineering faculties. This discipline provides knowledge to students through which the methods of obtaining, processing and transferring of information are taught.

Studying, designing, building, maintaining hardware and software systems, data collection, organizing, categorizing, and transferring of information are the principal goals which IT pursues. The primary ability of the graduates of this discipline would be the valid and prompt use of information. The core of this discipline is derived from computer engineering, especially the software division.

In this day and age, Information Technology is at the pinnacle of implementing change and development in the world. The advancements of technology are so intertwined with our lifestyle today that halting the progress would have an irreversible impact on people's lives and welfare. Henceforth, many countries have devised macro and micro operational measurements to institutionalize the utilization of IT, one of which is the academic inclination in the subject.

In our country as well, to create fundamental and logical changes and to attain a reliable and skilled workforce in the disciplines of information technology, concentrated and non-concentrated disciplines are being provided in higher education institutions, including universities. It can be said that the admittance of IT to the universities of the country goes back as far as early 2000, simultaneous with the gathering momentum related to information and communication in Iran. But it was only in 2001 that IT engineering officially entered Iranian universities in BSc and MSc levels under the authority of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology and so, the discipline was taught simultaneously in Elm o Sana'at, Amir Kabir and Shiraz universities at BSc level that year. Since then, the program is being taught in many national and private universities across the country with a substantially high demand even though novel it may be. Hence, this report tries to provide familiarity with the discipline and also the challenges, facilitations and frailties in this program.

Characteristics

Before anything, let us delve into the characteristics of information technology engineering. IT is considered interdisciplinary, meaning it is not a pure and in composed of disciplines such as management, industrial engineering, electronic engineering and computer engineering particularly the software division.

The interdisciplinary character of the discipline has led various universities such as Tarbiat Modaress, Khaje Nassir, Amir Kabir, Sharif and Elm o Sanaat to include it in their BSc program and other technical universities such as Azad, Elmi Karbordi, Poodmani as their Associate degrees.

According to this report, in the associate programs, the main focus is on teaching the Internet related subjects. Also in BSc, the students will be familiarized with the function and execution of networks in organizations and by the end, it slowly enters subjects related to project management. It is worth mentioning that at MSc level, IT offers vast sub-disciplinary programs such as e-commerce, multimedia systems, information systems management, data security, computer networks and information technology, some of which are taught in universities of Iran.

Not only will it focus on project completion at MSc level, but also on providing suitable solutions regarding complicated organizational problems. Although the discipline is not taught at PhD level in Iran, at this level, it pivots around new theories and theses regarding various correlating subjects.

Courses of IT

A revision of the lessons to be learned in IT shows that some of the articles of the constitution regarding data development and categorizations, qualitative utilization of data, data consistency, and faster data transfer, have been crucial elements in the selection of lessons in this major.

Obtaining the Curriculum

According to this report, IT, like any other discipline, has a number of general, main, primary and professional courses. The primary courses in BSc level usually include mathematics, differential equations, statistics and probability of engineering, physics and general workshops. The main courses include discrete mathematics, computer and programming fundamentals, machine language and system programming, data structure, logical circuits, computer architecture, advanced programming, operating systems, database and algorithm design. Also, software engineering, computer networks, fundamentals of digital electronics, artificial intelligence, fundamentals of management, fundamentals of economic engineering, network lab, database lab, technical and scientific writing and speech, specialized language, and operating systems lab are considered as the other main courses of this discipline.

In conclusion, the professional courses are divided into fundamentals of information technology, information technology engineering, e-commerce, IT project management and control, strategic planning for IT, electronic education, multimedia integrated environments, IT projects and internships.