Diagnosis of major challenges in information technology education in Lebanese schools

Abstract

In the educational system in Lebanon students are exposed to IT through all their school years, starting with the primary school, but in the first university programming course a high drop or failure rates are noticed. Despite this fact, we still identify high failure rates among students in programming courses. This leads us to the following question: Does this failure has roots in the High School curriculum and the tutoring strategies or is related to the programming curriculum? Our hypothesis derives from an integrated vision of the curriculum as a coherent entity spread all over the students learning curve despite the diversity of learning periods. The three components involved in the process of IT education are: the curriculum, the instructors responsible for the curriculum implementation and the students, who are the targeted population. To validate our hypothesis we examine the three components of IT education using a specific methodology: an analysis of the IT curriculum in schools, done in order to verify that the curriculum will meet the requirement of the university computer science courses; interviews with the instructors from different educational institution, private and public in order to assure and examine their alignment with the goals of the curriculum and finally an assessment of the students comprehension acquisition of the basic concepts of IT education is conducted through a simple quiz given to high school students in Lebanon.