Olivet Institute of Technology plans to offer courses on Cryptography and Information Security, Data Mining, and Web Technology and Development for its graduate students next quarter.

Cyber security has become crucial in IT Systems. Earlier this year, National Intelligence Director James Clapper identified cyber attacks and digital spying as the top threats to U.S. national security, eclipsing terrorism. With security integrated in its core curriculum, the Masters program at OIT covers the fundamental concepts focusing on the construction of secure systems and the human-computer interface.

In the course IT600 Cryptography and Information Security, students will learn both the principles and practice of cryptography and network security. Topics covered include basic concepts of cryptology, classical ciphers, modern symmetric ciphers (DES, IDEA, RC5), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), public key cryptography, data integrity, digital signature schemes and network security practice.

Data Mining and Analysis is another hot topic. In this course, students will develop an understanding of the strengths and limitations of popular data mining techniques and be able to identify promising applications of data mining in the context of church development, Gospel preaching, and spiritual growth.

Data mining, or intelligent analysis of information stored in data sets, has recently garnered substantial interest among practitioners in a variety of human-society fields and industry sectors. The course attempts to combine introductory knowledge and advanced topics on data mining into a single seminar. One of the goals of the course is to find out how the data mining technology can be used to help preach the Gospel effectively. It introduces the concepts, algorithms, techniques, and systems of data warehousing and data mining.

Web Technology and Development is one of OIT’s most popular courses. In this course, students will gain a broad knowledge of and experience in Web development technologies on both the Web server and client sides. Topics include XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby on Rails, as well as current technologies such as HTML5, Responsive Web, CSS Pre-Processor (Sass, LESS), JavaScript Frameworks (jQuery, AngularJS), Version Control (Git/GitHub), Data Formats (JSON, JSONP, XML), etc. Several practice projects will be integrated into this course to help students gain hands-on experience.