Proceedings,

Experience from different Teaching Paradigms in IS Education – An Evaluation of two Approaches

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international association for development of the information society, (2014)

Abstract

New teaching concepts in IS are highly relevant to deliver practical skills to IS students, as demanded by business practice. There are different approaches for providing knowledge. As IS research mostly uses quantitative methods, IS teaching still lacks behind in providing practical skills, i.e. system knowledge, teamwork or communication skills. We differentiate between teacher-centered and learner-centered approaches when designing new IS courses. The latter is characterized by creating learning environments, where students work on a solution for a given problem. Since nearly every company integrates its business processes in enterprise systems, we consider the teaching of ERP systems as particularly relevant for business practice. Hence, we designed different university master IS courses to deliver specific system knowledge in terms of strategic and operational skills. In this paper, we draw a conclusion from the comparison of two classes: one based on a classical teacher-centered approach and one designed with a new learner-centered approach. In order to monitor the impact of the two approaches as independent from the course subject as possible, we chose two courses focused on the selection and adoption of IT systems for the evaluation. The analyzed data for this study was gathered by a questionnaire-based survey in the last lesson of each course. We benchmarked different issues in both classes and finally came to the conclusion that learner-centered approaches on the one hand are characterized by a lot more effort for students but on the other hand lead to a deeper understanding of a topic area and additionally boost class attendance.

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