News and events archive

Hi,

over the past year, several significant changes have taken place in the bachelor's programme in Programming and Application Development (PVA), which has been the largest programme at the faculty for a little while now:

• a change of guarantor,

• the establishment of a separate programme board,

• the collection of student suggestions, and

• a major meeting of the programme board in December.

Now, in February, the minutes of this meeting have finally been released (unfortunately, delays in releasing program council minutes are common at FI, although this is not the fault of the program council), and I would like to highlight some of the most important changes here.

Before I begin, I feel the need to state that, as a graduate of the program, I have become one of the three student members of this new program council. In an internal SKAS vote, where we recommend student representatives to the dean for appointment to the program council, I abstained from voting on my own name, yet I gained the trust of my fellow senators, for which I thank them.

So what are the biggest changes for students coming out of the program council meeting? (coming from the 2026/27 academic year)

• PV028 Applied Information Systems (important content will become part of PB007 Software Engineering I), PB174 Programming in Python (never offered yet), and PB029 Electronic Document Preparation (deviates from the selection of VB000 and VB000Eng) will be removed from the study catalogue.

• On the other hand, PB015 AI: the Practical Perspective (offered for the first time this spring 2026) and PB173 Thematically Focused Application Development (the heterogeneity of the groups will allow it to cover various topics and attract experts from industry) will be added to the study catalogue.

• In the recommended course of study, the subject PB138 Fundamentals of Web Development and Markup Languages is moved from the 6th to the 4th semester in exchange for the group of subjects Programming (PB138 is more suitable for an internship in the 5th semester), and the group of subjects VB000 Fundamentals of Professional Style and VB000Eng Introduction to Academic Writing is moved from the 6th to the 5th semester (related to the faculty-wide change described in Czech-only here). A move of PB007 Software Engineering I back to the 3rd semester is being considered for the future.

• There will be systematic pressure on the quality of bachelor's theses, which will be expected to take 2 semesters to complete and produce a clear implementation output also with, for example, a software license. This necessitates greater awareness among both students (e.g., regarding the search for a supervisor) and supervisors (e.g., putting less emphasis on a state-of-the-art chapter due to genAI), as well as further adjustments to requirements. Possibilities for measuring improvements in thesis quality are being discussed.

• The guarantor of the SBPrip Repetition before SBZZ course promised that its content would be updated for PVA state exam questions. Unlike the Cybersecurity study program, there are currently no plans to remove it from the list of compulsory subjects.

• There are plans to further improve the program's links with industry, either through feedback on the relevance of subject content from informal groups of experts or through dialogue with companies regarding compulsory internships or final theses.

• In order to better inform applicants about the program, there is a need to differentiate it from other programmes at FI, competition outside FI, and the influence of generative artificial intelligence on the "craft" of programming. Specific changes, e.g. on the faculty's website, will follow.

The full minutes of the more than two-and-a-half-hour program council meeting, which goes into detail on the above points and contains additional points that did not fit here, are (in Czech-only) available in the document server in the IS.

Finally, I would like to invite you to follow the (Czech-only) blog in IS called Programming and Application Development, which was created by the program's two guarantors, Petr Švenda and Martin Macák, to further communicate with their students: https://is.muni.cz/auth/blog/PVA. If you are interested in further news from this study program, I recommend that you start following the blog and setting up email notifications.