In June 1994, Drexel's College of Information Science and Technology (IST) received a $1.1 million grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to support the development of The Drexel Curriculum for Information and Computing Professionals.

The College's goal in launching the four-year project is to lead the nation in providing information professionals to create and maintain the information infrastructure for the twenty-first century. In announcing the curriculum, IST's Dean Richard H. Lytle said, "We will lead by developing new programs, educating students in those programs, and by disseminating evaluated programs widely to other educational institutions."

The Drexel Curriculum for Information and Computing Professionals derives explicitly from the needs of society, and blends requisite disciplines such as computer science, software engineering, human factors, information systems, and library/information science. It integrates theory and practice in courses and laboratories, and employs new strategies to increase effectiveness of the faculty's curriculum management.

The curriculum, which generates undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education from a common curricular base, will develop and implement new methodologies to support continuous revision and evaluation.

In addition to changing program content, the curriculum will change the means of instructional delivery, building on the gains being made at IST through the computer-supported cooperative learning project recently funded by a $750,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Drexel Curriculum for Information and Computing Professionals blends the use of information technology and face-to-face encounters in delivery of courses.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan was established in 1930 to "help people to help themselves." As a private grantmaking organization, it provides seed money to organizations and institutions that have identified problems and designed constructive action programs aimed at solutions.

Most Foundation grants are awarded in the areas of youth, leadership, philanthropy and volunteerism, community-based health services, higher education, foods systems, rural development, groundwater resources in the Great Lakes area, and economic development in Michigan. Programming priorities concentrate grants in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and southern Africa.