The Department of Informatics History

The first courses related to computer technology were taught at the faculty already in the 1970s. The Department of Statistics and Mathematical Methods in Agriculture was a guaranteeing department, which, under the leadership of prof. ing. Jaroslav Kubíček, CSc. was equipped, among others, with a Cellatron minicomputer. The teaching focused exclusively on the issues of programming in the Fortran programming language and on providing a basic overview of technical and software resources.

In 1984, the computer science staff from the above-mentioned department were transferred to the Department of Law and Information Systems, where, under the leadership of Assoc. Prof. ing. Jiří Erbes, CSc., gained further room for the development of their disciplines and for connecting them practically with the application domain of their interest – enterprise information systems.

In 1990 under the leadership of Assoc. Prof. ing. Jaroslav Machala, CSc., the Department of Informatics and Operations Analysis was established. The department, among other things, guaranteed the courses related to computer technology. Since the academic year 1991/92, the teaching of the program Economic Informatics (EI) has been started. The program was unique in the excellent employment rate of graduates, given by the focus on informatics and computer technology as well as on the fields of economics and business management.

In 1996, a thorough evaluation of five years of experience in the field of teaching the Economic Informatics program took place, and in 1997, the Department of Informatics under the leadership of Assoc. Prof. Ing. Arnošt Motyčka, CSc. started with a new concept of teaching in the field of EI. Courses such as Theoretical Foundations of Informatics, Programming Techniques, Computer Networks, Information Technologies, and Systems Engineering were introduced.

Also, in 1997, for the first time, a conference on Informatics was organized, in which all department members participated and discussed the pedagogical and scientific tasks of the department. From the following year onwards, the conference was attended not only by our traditional colleagues from the informatics departments of the Faculty of Business and Economics of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, the Faculty of Economics and Management of the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, and the Faculty of Economics of the VSB – Technical University of Ostrava but also by a number of other partners from the faculties of economics and informatics of Czech universities.

In September 1998, the doctoral program Economic Informatics was accredited. This completed the last missing element in university education.

In September 1999, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Faculty of Business and Economics of MENDELU, the oldest faculty of economics in Moravia, the efforts of the staff of the Department of Informatics launched a trial run of the faculty information system, which was subsequently implemented at the university level. The system is currently used by more than 130,000 users at 12 universities in the Czech and Slovak Republics.

In 2005, thanks to the efforts of the department staff, MENDELU established an ECDL Testing Centre, which was accredited for both the ECDL Core and ECDL Advanced programs. For more than 10 years of the Centre’s existence, several hundred students of the university and interested members of the public have already obtained one of the ECDL certificates.

The academic year 2007/2008 brought another major expansion of informatics education at MENDELU. The Bachelor’s and then Master’s degree program in Engineering Informatics was newly opened, as well as the field of Automation Control and Informatics. Teaching in this program was mainly carried out by the staff of the Department of Informatics in cooperation with the Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Technology of the Faculty of Agronomy.

Since 2008, students of the university have had the opportunity to obtain professionally recognized certificates in the Cisco Networking Academy, and since 2013 also in the Juniper Networks Academic Alliance and MikroTik Academy. Teaching activities here have been coordinated and provided by certified instructors of the Department of Informatics.