Preparatory Courses

Preparatory courses are designed to prepare students for the computational rigor of the online programs from the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Two courses will be offered with coursework that emphasizes the foundational knowledge and competencies necessary to succeed in the programs.

Students admitted into a program who do not have prior demonstrated academic and/or work experience in areas such as programming, discrete math and data structures, operating systems, and computer architecture and organization, may be advised to start their program with up to 6 additional credits of preparatory coursework before they progress into the required 30 credits of core and elective coursework for their selected program.

The course uses the C language to teach an introduction to data structures. The course covers the basic constructs of programming and problem-solving: variables, control statements, iteration, structures, abstract data structures, algorithm analysis, array, strings, lists, trees, binary search trees, heaps, hashing, graphs.

This course covers computer organization topics such as CPU and pipeline architecture, data representation and memory hierarchies, assembly language and instruction sets. Operating system concepts include system calls, processes, threads, synchronization, memory management, Input-output, traps, and file systems.