Rejuvenation of the IT Program at King Saud University: A Change Reflecting Local and Global IT Trends Heyam Al-Baity Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sciences King Saud University, KSA halbaity@ksu.edu.sa Duaa H Alsaeed Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sciences King Saud University, KSA dalsaeed@ksu.edu.sa Sahar Bayoumi Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sciences King Saud University, KSA Institute of Graduate Studies and Research, Alexandria University, EGYPT sahali@ksu.edu.sa Nora Al-Twairesh Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sciences King Saud University, KSA twairesh@ksu.edu.sa Hend Al-Khalifa Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sciences King Saud University, KSA hendk@ksu.edu.sa ABSTRACT The Bachelor’s program in Information Technology (B.Sc. IT) at the King Saud University (KSU) conducted a significant upgrade of its curriculum in 2018, aiming to better prepare its graduates for the new trends in the fast-evolving IT industry. The upgraded curriculum includes the introduction of new specialized tracks, namely Data Science, Cyber Security, and Network and Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we report our experience of designing the new curriculum over the past couple of years. We first provide a historical overview of the IT degree at KSU. We then describe the program design and its rationale. We then conclude with an assessment of the curriculum outcomes to meet ACM/ABET requirements. CCS Concepts •Social and professional topics → Accreditation •Social and professional topics → Computing education programs •Social and professional topics → Information technology education Keywords Information Technology; IT Curriculum Development; Information Technology Education; Saudi Arabia ACM Reference format: Heyam Al-Baity. Duaa H Alsaeed, Sahar Bayoumi, Nora Al-Twairesh and Hend Al-Khalifa. 2018. Rejuvenation of the IT Program at King Saud University: A Change Reflecting Local and Global IT Trends. In Proceedings of the 19 th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE’18). Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241866 1. INTRODUCTION Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is an essential sector in Saudi Arabia (SA) to proceed with its plans to diversify its economy as well as achieve the ambitious goals of its 2030 Vision. The need for information technology (IT) professionals equipped with the required skills to drive the next transformation of SA is becoming a necessity. Thus, the required role of academic institutions is to adapt to the dynamic change of local market demands and equip its graduates with up-to-date IT skills. Nonetheless, there is a global thriving need for IT professionals and the bloom of the IT sector is evident everywhere. Accordingly, the IT department at King Saud University (KSU) proposed a significant upgrade of its Bachelor program curriculum in 2018, aiming to better prepare its graduates for new trends in the fast-evolving IT sector. The IT department at KSU was established in 1987, under the name “Computer Applications” department; then, in 2005, it was renamed as the Information Technology department [1]. The department is one of five departments at the College of Computer and Information Sciences (CCIS). The other four departments are Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, and Software Engineering. Moreover, the IT department is only for female students with no male counterpart, with a current enrolment of more than 400 students. Over the past couple of decades, the IT program went through two rounds of updates. The first one was in 2008, when the program introduced three new tracks, namely Data Management, Web and Multimedia, and Network and Security 1 . The program then received the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) accreditation in 2012 with no deficiencies. The second update was in 2018 with the introduction of new specialized tracks, which are: Data Science (DS), Cyber Security (CYS), and Network and IoT Engineering (NIE). These 1 http://ccis.ksu.edu.sa/en/it/it-course-catalog Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. SIGITE '18, October 3–6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM I SBN 978-1-4503-5954-2/18/10…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241866 Session 5A: Papers Research SIGITE’18, October 3-6, 2018, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA 129