Western Governors University

Return to Archives
Return to Article Summaries

July-August 2007, Vol. 6, Issue 7

TALKING WITH RUKI JAYARAMAN, WGU'S IT PROGRAMS DIRECTOR

To get a sense for what’s going on in WGU’s College of Information Technology, Educational Pathways talked with IT Programs Director Ruki Jayaraman. The College of Information Technology offers six BS degrees and participates in the WGU MBA program that offers an emphasis in information technology management. About 1,350 students are enrolled in the College of Information Technology, which is in the process of developing two new graduate-level programs, one with an emphasis in enterprise data architecture and the other with an emphasis in database security and standards.

EdPath: What kind of students typically enroll in WGU’s IT programs?

Ruki: The majority of our students (close to 70 percent) are already in the workforce. They’ve already been in IT for several years. In most cases, they already have the competencies, and they come into the degree program and take the assessments to demonstrate that they have the competencies to get the degree. A lot of these students come to us because, sometimes, in order to get ahead in their careers, they need to have a degree.

EdPath: Please tell us about the mentors in these programs. What backgrounds do they have, and what’s a typical mentoring session like?

Ruki: The WGU mentor model is more of an academic advisement kind of a model. Our mentors don’t teach as such. In terms of their backgrounds, the minimum qualification that they all have is a master’s degree. A lot of them have Ph.D’s. They’re pretty well qualified, and most of our mentors, if not all of them, have had industry experience in IT. Typically they mentor the students on not just all the WGU policies and procedures, and getting them ready for assessments, but they also mentor students on some of the content. While they don’t teach, they do offer a lot of content-related support as the student prepares to take the competencies and pass the assessments.

EdPath: Where are mentors based?

Ruki: They are dispersed everywhere. What we try to do when we assign students to mentors is match up time zones, so this way it makes sense for students that are on the east coast to work with mentors on the east coast.

EdPath: Do mentors ever come to Salt Lake City?

Ruki: Twice a year we have academic meetings where they come here for three days, and usually we try and coincide that with our graduation dates, so this way they can attend graduation and actually meet with their students face-to-face and watch the students walk during graduation. We have a whole bunch of academic meetings where we have training sessions, where we share best practices. We have other useful sessions where we get other departments to come speak with the mentors. So, it’s pretty good.

EdPath: Do mentors go through any kind of online training program?

Ruki: Yes, we have a pretty extensive online training program when the mentors come on board. Before they are assigned to students, we provide them with two to three weeks of intense training, and we assign them to a senior mentor who they shadow for a little while in order to get a sense of how the mentoring works. It’s a pretty good model, and it’s all online. Because we are an online institution, and that’s how our students learn, it makes sense to have our mentors go through the whole learning process to gain the competencies to become a mentor online as well.

EdPath: Before they graduate, students must complete a capstone. What are those like?

Ruki: The capstone is pretty much a culmination of everything the student has learned and acquired in terms of competencies. The capstone is equivalent to a dissertation, or a thesis, or a senior research project that students do at traditional universities. The student is required to basically demonstrate that they’ve acquired competencies in all of the areas that fall inside the program, including general education and liberal arts requirements. There are also the IT pieces that they have to integrate and synthesize into everything that they’ve learned. The capstone typically ends up being an IT project that they’ve worked on. For example, a student that is in the database emphasis is supposed to set up an enterprise database system, or a data warehousing system. They’re supposed to actually put together a business plan about the enterprise data architecture, if you will. And then what kind of database, what kind of technologies would they use? What is the architecture and the technology that they would use? How would they install the database? How would they set up the users and the permissions? So it pretty much involves a detailed implementation plan in the area of IT where they’re setting up a network or setting up all of the firewalls, setting up a database system, setting up security on the database system. It’s a major IT project, and the capstone would involve writing a proposal for that project. That means the writing has to be really, really good. Everything that they’ve learned in the English domains, the language and the communication domains, come into play. They also need to put together a budget model, so everything that they may have learned in quantitative literacy also comes into play. And then there is a critical thinking piece, so some parts of troubleshooting and some parts of trying to put together the risk factors comes into play because they take assessments in critical thinking and problem solving. And we have some detailed rubrics for the capstone that actually tells them what is required inside of the capstone.

EdPath: Can you give us a sense of what students do when they leave the program?

Ruki: Yes, a lot of the students want to come back and get their master’s. And I am so thrilled with the direction we are headed in because a lot of our assessments are industry-based certification exams. A lot of our assessments are vendor assessments. So the competencies that we measure in the IT programs are real world, hands-on, very much things that are used in the day-to-day lives of an IT person in the industry. Those are the competencies that we actually built into our program. Our graduates are productive on day one because our competencies are based on real-world competencies; they are very hands-on and very much oriented to the work force. In a lot of IT organizations a degree is not as important as having the hands-on skills. Employers say "give me somebody that I can quickly make productive on day one on the job as opposed to having to go through a long, extended, training period where we have to teach them because they’re so theoretical-oriented." So this is where the value of our degree is - incorporating real-world, hands-on skills. This is what we hear all the time. Employers also say "give us students who are content certified, that are CIW certified, that are Oracle certified, Microsoft certified. We don’t care if they come with a degree in hand as long as they have these." And this is demonstrated at WGU by students actually walking away with industry certifications.

EdPath: What about new programs on the horizon?

Ruki: We are in the process of developing two master’s degree programs. In fact, one of them - I wish I could take it myself - is going to be a degree in enterprise data architecture, which is very much needed in the marketplace. It’s going to be totally hands-on; it’s going to be very business-focused and very little academia-focused. We’re really excited, and we’re hoping to be able to launch that either in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of next year. The other one is in security. Once again, it is extremely hands-on because security, especially data security and standards, are very much needed in the industry. So these are the two that we are hoping to launch. We’ve done a fair amount of market research on these two programs, and what we’re offering I think will be very much needed in the marketplace and very unique.

Return to Archives
Return to Article Summaries