Engineering a Complete Curriculum Overhaul

We present an eight-year curriculum redesign effort impacting almost every course in our computer science department. Having not made a major update to our curriculum in two decades, complications began to arise from significant increases in enrollment and instituting multiple degrees in computing in the same department. Starting from a desire to adjust a few courses, we systematically collected a broad set of requirements and blue-sky ideas from many stakeholders, resulting in an unsatisfiable set of content, ordering, and course boundary constraints. After multiple rounds of conversation with our stakeholders in and out of the department, we evolved and relaxed several of our constraints, allowing us to develop a compromise plan for seven new courses and a new prerequisite system. We then piloted five of the new courses and collected feedback on results, iterating on these courses each semester for two years. We worked with registrars, advisors, and administrators to develop a transition plan from old to new courses. This paper presents highlights of each step of this process, a summary of the resulting curriculum design, and reflections and recommendations for other departments that may want to undertake a similar update.