CSC 118, Information Technology and Society, is a course for health-science and non-technical majors at the University of Miami. Most of the room is not studying computer science. Many will spend their careers using software they did not build, cannot inspect, and will be asked to trust.
The course is not an introduction to programming. It is an introduction to judgment: where computing comes from, who pays for it, what it fails at, and how to ask a competent question about a system whose code you will never read.
The room
Fall 2025: 36 students. Spring 2026: 27. Fall 2026: 40. The mix includes health science, economics, business and computer science. Evaluations from the first two terms: 4.9 / 5.0 overall, 5.0 / 5.0 for availability, 4.9 / 5.0 for stimulating interest.
What they learn to ask
The course moves through AI ethics, the history of computing, the geopolitics of software, semiconductor manufacturing, and human-computer interaction. The point is not fluency in any one of them. It is that a student can hear “the model decided” and ask: trained on whom, by whom, with what recourse, and what happens when it is wrong.
Two units carry the health thread directly:
- AI in healthcare on where models enter clinical work.
- Digital addiction and the addictive software design survey on how products are built to hold attention, and what that means for patients and clinicians.
How the room works
Lecture introduces a concept. Practicum is where students build, break and fix it, and it carries 64% of the grade across sixteen sessions: breadboards and truth tables, hosting a site in the cloud, spreadsheets, Python.
The capstone is a student-led seminar. Four students meet for an hour, each leading fifteen minutes on a topic they chose. They submit a proposal and an annotated bibliography of five sources beforehand, and may bring only the bibliography and marked-up sources into the room, with no script. The other three engage with the topic as active participants, and the instructor facilitates and assesses.
The assignment calls it a Socratic seminar. In practice it is a small-group seminar where each student teaches a subject specific to them.
Why this is the health-AI problem
Clinical AI is not deployed by engineers alone. It is adopted by clinicians, administrators and patients who have to decide whether to trust a score, a triage suggestion, or a model trained somewhere else. Teaching the people on that side of the system to inspect it is part of making it safe.