Report of SIGITE 2013
Haixia Liu
Uppsala University
9 Oct – 12 Oct
Orlando, FL

I’d like to group the conference contents into 2 categories: Soft and Hard.

Soft

1.1 Curriculums revising.
According to the job markets demanding, new techniques need to be introduced to students, such as cloud computing and data analysis. The courses that were established in 2008 might need revising. Comprehensive discussions have been carried out among the scholars, who voted for one of the 3 options: (a) need revising desperately, (b) don’t need revising, (c)revise to some degree/scale. The majority of people prefer the third option.
At the discussion, scholars pointed out that the basic theories stay the same. For example: there are “networks” going on behind Cloud computing. Therefore, we should keep the fundamentals, if we need to drop some courses.
1.2 innovative teaching techniques
Flipped classroom. gamification based teaching methods to get students engaged in the courses.
1.3 hot topics
Researchers gave presentations covering new discoveries about the hot topics, such as cyber, mobile, security, students perceptions, programming, gaming, demographics, entrepreneurs, 3D printer techniques, interdisciplinary and UML.

Hard

New teaching facilities are introduced into the traditional classroom. Lectures started to pay attention on how to use less to do more.
2.1 virtual classroom
techniques used: ooVoo, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Webex, LMS, Blackboard.
2.2 utilizing shared servers in lab
Apart from the presentations (including paper, poster, panel sessions) given by the researchers, the sponsors introduced their new products features. Academic Alliance proposed new course packages for students, including cloud computing and big data analysis. ABET gave introductions about their current business outcomes.