Introducing an Interdisciplinary Course Into General Higher Education: Information Theory

Introduction

Indiana University South Bend is a public university located in South Bend, Indiana. It is the third largest campus of Indiana University. Its campus-wide general education curriculum provides students with knowledge and skills of a variety of academic disciplines, including writing, critical thinking, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, visual literacy, health, finance, contemporary social values, art, human and society, and the natural world (Cordell, 2013). The general education curriculum at Indiana University South Bend is designed to complement the major programs and ensure the graduates will have the breadth of knowledge and experience enabling them to think critically, act intelligently, and behave professionally in their future career and personal life. The ultimate goal of general education curriculum at IU South Bend is to educate students as valued citizens and life-long learners.

Among the aforementioned general education disciplines, the nature world is a common core subject. Based on the university policy, the common core courses should provide disciplinary content with interdisciplinary components that allow students to view the course as a cross-discipline topic. Before 2018, the natural world courses included the disciplines of astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics.

Because nowadays, computer technology is widely used in business and our daily life and computer science is becoming part of the fundamental knowledge for a regular citizen, in 2017 Computer Science Department of IU South Bend decided to propose a new course CSCI-N390 (Information Theory) to enrich the contents and disciplines of the natural world common core subject.

The objective of this course (CSCI-N390: Information Theory) is to provide an outline of information theory to students using an interdisciplinary approach. Through taking this course, students are expected to appreciate information as a fundamental component of the physical world and understand how information relates to the functioning of our complex society.

This chapter describes the rationale of offering this course, course contents, scheduling, assessment, and sample case studies. The objective of this chapter is to present the higher education community an interdisciplinary course example that covers the most important knowledge of this era–information theory, which is the key element to acutely understanding the functioning of the physical world and the human society.

To our knowledge, this is the first report that information theory is introduced in college general education curriculum. Given the importance of information and computer technology, this topic could make considerable impact on students’ college study and their future career development and life experience. The significance of the study presented in this chapter can be summarized as the following. First, this course can serve as a pilot study to investigating the feasibility of introducing cutting-edge knowledge and technologies into college general education. Second, this study can be used to demonstrate how general education can shape college students’ practical knowledge base, affect their worldview, and improve their decision-making. Third, theoretically, this study enriches the literature of higher-education innovation through presenting a case study that is both pragmatic and essential in the era of education revolution.

The remaining of the chapter is organized as follows. We first review the background work in general education. Then, we provide the course description, including topics, rationale for course offering, learning methods, schedule, assignment, and assessment. Next, we discuss implications and limitations of the study and present future work. Finally, we conclude the chapter.