Block week course provides chance for students to hear from UCalgary IT professionals

It’s not every day the University of Calgary’s IT team, who primarily work behind the scenes to keep our IT network and services running smoothly, get to work directly with students. And it’s not every day that students get to learn from experienced IT professionals from UCalgary.

But during one block week course, BTMA 333 — Enterprise Analysis — that’s exactly what happened.

“While everything we do ties into improving student, research and staff experience, it’s not very often we get that first-hand opportunity to work with the students and make a difference in their educational experience,” says Lauren Corbett-McGuffin, a project manager in the IT business unit. “So I really enjoyed that part of it.”

Students were divided into small groups tasked with using information they learned in the course to find a technology-based solution to a business problem. In this case, the problem was helping students quickly and easily find available study spaces on campus.

Ray Patterson, professor and area chair in business technology management at the Haskayne School of Business, covered different components of the analysis and design process each day. Participants from the IT business unit served as project mentors to help answer questions and provide guidance to the teams.

Ten UCalgary IT professionals representing various IT roles, including project management, network and security specialists, and IT partners, provided more than 60 hours of in-class mentorship time. They not only mentored students with their projects, but the students also presented their final project proposals to them, much as they would do in a real-life situation after graduation.

According to Patterson, “These mentors contributed immensely towards a greatly enriched student experience. We have an extremely professional IT staff at the University of Calgary, and the idea was to utilize this incredible internal resource to enhance the student classroom experience.

“It was the first time that we’ve tried something like this on such a large scale, and it was a great success. This active learning partnership was incredibly valuable to student learning, and I believe that the mentors will tell you that they also personally gained from the experience.”

The value of the faculty/business unit partnership was evident in feedback from students. Ben Petros says the chance to connect course work to real-life applications was meaningful and enriching. “I think the mentors were a very unique and welcome addition to the course. They were able to help us understand some of the challenges that our projects would face in the real world.”