The need for such a committee is rooted in the fact that visualization courses have been offered since the late 1980's with a variety of topics. With the debut of "Visualization in Scientific Computing", as described in the much cited publication [McCormick, DeFanti, and Brown, 1987], the desire to inform about visualization came into existence, but no formal training for educators to teach such courses, nor a common understanding of the "main themes" of visualization was available. This lead to an unbalanced form of teaching visualization courses, focusing on individual topics, and leaving out important issues such as definitions, goals, or concepts of visualization. The EVC came into existence in 1992 and worked mainly on curriculum issues for the first years. Starting in 1995, tutorials about the main course topics were developed and taught. This was specifically important, because at that time there was a lack of textbooks on visualization.

In 2005 we have done a new survey of courses teaching "Visualization". We have found that current courses can be categorized into "computer-generated visualization courses" (some of them focusing more on scientific and some more on information visualization), and courses focusing on particular aspects (e.g medical application, or VR) of visualization. A strongly growing direction in teaching visualization courses are interdisciplinary/collaborative courses. These courses are often team taught by faculty from different disciplines (e.g. Computer Science and Art, or various science departments) and/or encourage students from different departments to take the same course and work together in projects. More than 40 courses were assembled and categorized on the website "Visualization Courses World Wide" for educators to browse and compare. "Visualization Courses World Wide" is a subsite of the report

Curriculum for Visualization

Gitta Domik, (domik-at-uni-paderborn.de)
University of Paderborn
Department of Computer Science
Fuerstenallee 11
D-33102 Paderborn, Germany