Career Track Based Capstone Course Design for Information Systems Curriculum

The aim of technical education is to design a career-based curriculum that imparts a set of skills to students and enable them to contribute to a nation's economic progress. With their multifarious uses, information systems (IS) lie at the heart of modern economies. IS curricula offer several tracks for students to pursue career paths based on their interests and opportunities. To offer students an opportunity to apply the knowledge they glean from classroom instructions on real-world problems, capstone projects are essential elements in most, if not all, IS programs. As IS programs increasingly offer a wider range of career paths for students, the design and delivery of such capstone projects present a set of unique challenges. In this paper, we examine the set of challenges and share our experience from designing and delivering a career track-based capstone course for the first time at a large university. Feedback from students and faculty supervisors indicates that the course was able to meet its learning objectives to a notable extent and offered important pointers to future improvements in the course design.