Long before AI became a household word, the University of Victoria’s Department of Computer Science was rethinking what a modern degree should look like. The result is a model for how universities can stay ahead of a discipline in rapid transformation.
When Kevin Stanley became chair of the University of Victoria’s (UVic) Department of Computer Science in January 2023, one of his first priorities was to answer a question: was the program keeping pace with a discipline that is moving faster than ever? And so, he sat down individually with every faculty member to ask where they wanted to take the department next.
He heard that faculty members were eager to ensure that the curriculum reflected the current state of a field that never stands still.
Software at the heart of every sector
In the past decade software had become central to healthcare, creative industries, scientific research, and virtually every other area of work. The department wanted to be confident that it was keeping pace.
What followed was a deliberate, phased process beginning the following month that year, with a workshop partnering with Learning and Teaching Innovation on program-level outcomes, followed by a full faculty retreat in June. Subcommittees were organized not around existing courses, but around learning outcomes defined by the Association for Computing Machinery—the world’s largest education and scientific computing society— a key distinction that would shape everything that came after.
At the time the review began, large language models (LLMs) were just entering the public sphere. Rather than react to a specific technology, the committee made a strategic choice to zoom out, define what graduates should be able to know and do, and let the courses follow from that. The curriculum that emerged is less a response to AI than a rethinking of what computer science education is for.
How UVic integrated AI across its computer science degree
As LLMs captured widespread public attention, UVic computer scientists were already well ahead of the curve, and the new curriculum would reflect that. Rather than bolting AI courses onto the existing framework, the department reimagined the arc of the entire four-year experience.
AI is woven throughout the coursework from the start, so that in first year, students will develop awareness and learn to use it as a tutor and thinking partner, not a shortcut. A dedicated AI course in third year builds on two years of core CS fundamentals, ensuring students have the depth to go further, faster. By fourth year, students are expected to use AI fluently and critically. The curriculum introduces agentic coding, multi-agent systems, and programming by specification in a new required software engineering course, with advanced AI and machine learning courses to match. The curriculum’s reframing was also intended to break down the silos between existing courses. Decisions were grounded in learning outcomes rather than old course boundaries. Where those outcomes cut across areas of study, new courses could emerge, so that the structure follows the learning, not the other way around.
AI is the tool. We’re not creating prompt designers—we want students to understand the underlying infrastructure.”
—Kevin Stanley, Chair, Computer Science Department
Teaching responsible AI at UVic from day one
One of the key features of the new curriculum is the prioritization of ethical computer science via a required ethics course in first year.
The department looked at how peer institutions handle ethics and saw that many distribute it across existing courses, and they wanted to make a different decision. A dedicated foundational course that every student takes early on, before they encounter the harder technical material, means that by the time they reach upper-level courses they understand the concepts and know the vocabulary to engage with ethical challenges more deeply.
As Stanley says, “We didn’t want to be in the position that software is currently in, where it seems like ethics is left to the end. We wanted it to be foundational.”
In a moment when the societal implications of AI are being debated at every level, graduating students who have been trained from day one to ask the hard questions shows that responsible technology is a core competency rather than an afterthought.
Built by consensus, guided by evidence
Building the new curriculum was an exercise in the kind of collaborative, evidence-based thinking that the department wants its students to master. Celina Berg, who chaired the review committee, describes a process that required patience, evidence, and a commitment to keeping the vision ambitious, but still practical and scalable.
The key that unlocked it was the learning outcomes framework. Rather than debating what courses to keep and what to cut, the committee grounded their work in a fundamental question: what should a UVic CSC graduate actually be able to do by the end of their degree?
This gave them a shared language and basis for each choice. As Berg notes, “The more critical a concept is, the earlier it should appear. We pushed the most important things closest to first year, and that way you can build in flexibility later.”
That principle shaped the “7 of 9” (spot the Star Trek reference) model that students encounter at third year where they will choose seven courses from nine core offerings, giving them agency in their degree, while the department guarantees all nine are offered every term. The list of nine is not fixed forever and will evolve as the discipline evolves.
The process was collaborative: committee and subcommittee work by faculty and staff, student surveys, and a further layer of review committees for individual course additions and deletions. The result is a curriculum that has ownership across every area of computer science taught by the department, and everyone who learns, teaches, works and researches in its many areas.
Beyond computer science: An interdisciplinary vision
The revised curriculum deepens UVic’s longstanding commitment to combined degrees by enhancing students’ ability to bring AI-powered computer science to fields as varied as art, music, geography, health and mathematics.
The Department of Computer Science believes that the key applications of AI will not emerge from computer science departments alone, but will come from people who understand both the technology and the domain it is entering: the health informatics researcher who can also write the model, or the computational musician who understands what the algorithm is actually doing.
It also reflects a choice to use the department’s size to its advantage to create a curriculum that is integrated and adaptable in ways that can’t be achieved in larger, more siloed programs. The department is nimbler, and the new curriculum is designed to make the most of that.
What a new computer science curriculum means for the future of AI education
Curriculum change at a university is rarely fast, and it is never simple. It requires consensus across a diverse faculty, navigation of academic governance, and the meticulous work of translating a vision into course structures and scheduling realities.
That the Department of Computer Science began this process in 2023, well ahead of the AI wave that would soon dominate headlines, shows a department with academic vision, committed to staying ahead of the field.
The software engineering job market is recovering and global job openings have nearly doubled since a low in 2023, with demand for engineers remaining strong despite AI development.
Recent industry data shows that the nature of these jobs is also shifting, and roughly 40 per cent of engineering job postings now mention AI coding tools as requirements or preferred skills. Students entering computer science now are making a smart bet, and the new UVic CSC curriculum will produce graduates with the depth to meet a market that wants those who understand AI, not just those who can use it.
The new curriculum takes effect for incoming students in fall 2026. For a generation of students who will spend their careers navigating a world shaped by artificial intelligence, it offers something exciting: a degree that was designed directly for them.
As Stanley says, “Students entering now will grow up academically with AI, as the program grows up with AI. They’ll have studied it from their first year, and they will understand it ethically.”
