School of Information Technology celebrates 15 years with CECH

School of Information Technology celebrates 15 years with CECH

It's been a decade and a half since information technology joined the college

July 1, 2026, marked 15 years since the academic unit now recognized as the University of Cincinnati's (UC) School of Information Technology (SoIT) first joined the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services (CECH).

The school has brought wide-ranging courses of study, professional alliances and future career options to the college community, expanding CECH's ability to change lives and communities through its impactful work.

UC's SoIT has embodied CECH's "Be the Change" motto over the past 15 years, welcoming students from an array of backgrounds into its programs to gain essential skills for professional engagement in technological fields. But as a school dedicated to an oft-misunderstood field, it has led some to voice a looming question: What, exactly, is information technology? We hear the term all the time, but what's IT actually all about?

"IT is not about the technology," says SoIT director Hazem Said. "It's about solutions that meet the needs of people using the technology." This solution-centered definition echoes the school's mission statement, which holds that the SoIT exists to "advance society through the study of solutions and needs that connect people, information and the technology of the time."

Back to the beginning

To understand how SoIT arrived at this 15-year anniversary as part of CECH, we need to go back to the founding of the academic unit. According to Said the university undertook a year 2000 restructuring that incorporated programs from the College of Evening and Continuing Education and the University College, both of which offered IT-related courses, into the College of Applied Science. The university initiative corresponded with a national trend in academia to determine what a program focused on IT should look like. For Said, the confluence of these two happenings presented an important opportunity.

"Under the umbrella of the university restructuring, I proposed to the dean that we merge all of these different programs from Applied Science, the University College and the Evening College," he explains, "and create one Information Technology program in alignment with the newly developed standards that were taking shape at the time. He agreed, so I collaborated with the faculty. We transitioned, built the undergraduate program in Information Technology, and got it approved by the state in 2004."

The next step, he says, was to build a dedicated department as a home to this and future programs, a proposal that was realized in 2006 when the School of Applied Science formally established the Department of Information Technology. (Said served as the first head of this department.) When UC made the 2010 decision to merge two colleges and create the College of Engineering and Applied Science, the move spurred multiple visions for the future of information technology at UC. One idea called for Information Technology and Computer Science to merge under one school, but a competing notion to consolidate engineering programs and require a unified first year of engineering courses revealed a disconnect with the vision of the faculty.

"We started a journey of exploration to see, if Engineering was not the right fit for our vision for the program, where would the program be?" explains Said. "Our vision at the time was that the program require hands-on technical skills, problem-solving skills and communication skills."

Hazem Said Director, School of Information Technology

In searching for a new home, the faculty were drawn to CECH, which Said noted "sits in the application of social theory to solve problems that impact the lives of people." CECH was home to three schools operating semi-independently, and the college as a whole was focused on action, actually doing things to improve communities. Furthermore, there was an evident entrepreneurial spirit spread across the college community, spearheaded by then-dean Lawrence J. Johnson, who proved instrumental in moving the department of IT to CECH.

"I knew with the right support, resources and leadership it could be a great program," explains Johnson. "I also thought it fit the mission of the college. CECH is a collection of professional programs that graduates students committed to making communities stronger. That is exactly what IT does, teach individuals to use technology to transform how we communicate, work, learn, access healthcare-to enhance the community experience.

"I made a proposal to the provost arguing we could dramatically grow the program and make it an incredible asset. He agreed, and the program was moved to CECH."

SoIT director Hazem Said. Photo/CECH Marketing

Solutions that meet the needs of people

The wisdom of the college's decision to welcome and invest in Information Technology quickly proved itself. "We were one of the first programs in the nation to be accredited as an information technology program and the very first in Ohio," says Said. "We were also the first to execute on the idea that IT is about solutions that meet the needs of people, and getting our faculty and students to understand how to use technology as a tool to build those solutions for people. That idea was inspired by the work of CECH faculty and staff and would likely not have matured if the integration with CECH did not happen."

Over the past 15 years, UC's SoIT has been intentional about providing relevant solutions in the high-paced field. "IT changes very frequently," says Said, "and the unit had to have some flexibility to be able to cope with that change."

He explains that staying nimble has meant aligning to a multi-layered strategy. The SoIT's co-op program places students in real-world industry settings, while industry professionals are also invited to teach in classrooms. On the other hand, an extensive capstone experience and the IT Expo connect student activity with the IT workforce of today. "In the final year, students present a project to industry," he says. "As you go back and look at project titles, you'll see the evolution of the discipline itself."

"One of my favorite ways to stay involved has been serving as a judge for the senior design projects at the annual IT Expo," says Mitchell Mustain, a 2007 graduate of the IT program and senior technical product manager at Great American Insurance Group. "It's been fantastic to watch how student projects have evolved alongside technology trends over the years, and it's always inspiring to see the level of talent coming out of the program."

"As a student, for me the IT Expo represented the culmination of months of hard work, collaboration, problem-solving and preparation," says Hayes, who's enjoyed returning to the IT Expo for the past 10 years as an employer and industry representative. "Looking back, it was much more than a presentation event. It provided students with the opportunity to work as a team, design solutions from the ground up, and demonstrate how they could apply what they had learned to solve real-world business and technology challenges."

"Our IT courses are all project-based," adds Said. "Students are actually doing something, not just theorizing about it."

This project-based educational approach provided key memories Mustain holds from his time as an IT student. "I still carry so many great memories from my time as a student," he says, "especially those late nights in the lab working on projects alongside classmates who became lifelong friends." Though he graduated a few years before the school joined CECH, he cites the impact of school faculty on his academic and professional careers.

Leaving room for adaptive flexibility has enabled the SoIT to add tracks and programs as the industry evolves. The school was the first Ohio public university to offer an accredited cybersecurity degree, it added courses like cloud computing and recently introduced a handful of courses on AI. And in August 2025, the school hosted a curriculum symposium, inviting academic advisors, co-op advisors, faculty, students and industry leaders to propose curriculum changes in response to AI.

Intelligent information technology

Even for a constantly changing field such as information technology, the current moment of artificial intelligence we're in seems particularly transformative. The tech has inspired both breathless hyperbole and anxious handwringing (especially in consideration of its potential effects on education and learning), but the SoIT has decided to approach AI with utilitarian levelheadedness in responding to the emerging tech, exemplified by the recent curriculum symposium.

"It took us a lot of soul searching to understand what AI means for IT. Everybody talks about AI, but AI is a lot of things. What we see are tools based on AI technologies," says Said. "We settled that AI will transform the discipline of information technology to become intelligent information technology. Once we framed it this way, we started moving our research and our curriculum."

This nimble response would be seen as uncharacteristic for a typical academic program, but it's a key part of the adaptive flexibility at the core of UC's SoIT. In addition to adding courses on AI-three undergraduate and two at the graduate level-the school also changed content for over 30 courses to incorporate AI and intelligence. They've proposed a master's degree on applied AI for cybersecurity and are renaming the Information Technology master's program to be Master of Science in Intelligent Information Technology. In all, the symposium produced 86 curriculum improvement measures that SoIT faculty voted on in 2026.

"One of the greatest strengths of the program is its ability to evolve alongside the technology industry," says Hayes. "Areas such as information security, data analytics, and emerging technologies have continued to expand, reflecting the changing needs of employers and students."

Featured photo at top: A student interacts with a presentation at the School of Information Technology's annual IT Expo event. Photo/CECH Marketing

School of Information Technology

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