Abstract

The importance of communication technologies in different sectors was heightened by the emergence of computer-driven fields in data science, artificial intelligence and computer programming languages. The study reflected on a projection in 2018, that the number of job opportunities for data and analytics skills will increase from 364,000 to 2,720,000 by 2020. Going by the same projection, between 2017 and 2021, studies in artificial intelligence were expected to grow in scope and demand by 47.5% in the US education sector alone, where a total of 294,900 employed computer programmers were estimated in the United States in the year 2020. Furthermore, effects from their increasing usefulness continue to spiral from the US into other continents without corresponding effects in Africa. Surprisingly, little or no effort has been made to fill the existing gap in curriculum posed by these ever-evolving fields. The study adopted theory and data-driven qualitative document analysis of the documentation on curriculum and ICT adoption, it was recommended among other things, that government and higher institution stakeholders provide enabling infrastructure to accommodate emerging trends in the digital landscape; and that curriculum development in higher institutions be made responsive to labour market demands, while incorporating the emerging fields within the global domain.