What's in a Name?: International Interpretations of Computing Education Terminology

The ACM, the AIS, and the IEEE Computer Society have jointly defined five computing disciplines: computer engineering, computer science, information systems, information technology, and software engineering. These terms and many others are used as the names of educational programmes. Across the world, the same name may be used for quite different programmes and different names for similar programmes. This makes it difficult for potential students, employers, and educators to determine the nature of a particular programme and how it compares to others. Because computing is global, greater clarity in terminology is required. We have surveyed academics and literature internationally to determine the scale of the nomenclature issue across the globe. A consistent naming scheme would be ideal, but the different terminologies are now entrenched in different countries, so this paper provides the next best option, a taxonomy of the principal terms and their meanings.