Exploring and Evaluating E-Business Models: A Preliminary Study of a Community-Based Website

Social media is the use of the Internet and mobile technologies to share user-generated content. At a broader level, social media has been providing an increasing amount of the information that is presented to very wide audiences. However, hyper-local media is a form of such social media that tries to target a comparably narrow but focused group of audience with timely and related content. OpenAnchorage presents our vision of a hyper-local information site. It was developed to collect community information created by the local providers and present this information on a local area map where interested users can select the data relevant to their hyper-local geographic area. OpenAnchorage website simultaneously requires a process of providing both new technology and new content. The research design is an iterative analysis-adjustment and adaption-data collection with an integrated process of using Business Model Canvas and Customer Development Stack. The goal of this project is to determine the potential business model or models that will serve our site best by using this innovative, iterative, experiment approach. The desire is that, eventually, the site will be able to get a critical mass of participation, to generate socio-economic values to serve our community, and to support its own long-term sustainability

A Project-Centric Curriculum Design

Student success was the motivation for evolving an individual project-based course into a project-centric curriculum. A one semester project was first extended across a sequence of three interrelated courses tied together through their focus on the success of small team projects that spanned those courses. This sequence was then targeted as the core of a redesign of the entire program curriculum focused on project and student success. Currently, the department is in the process of introducing the measurement of project success as a tool for assessment and control of the department’s learning objectives. An overview of the design of this curriculum, lessons learned from developing it, and benefits of this type of curriculum in quality of student learning, community engagement, and reputation of the university, will be discussed

Controlling Curriculum Redesign with a Process Improvement Model

A portion of the curriculum for a Management Information Systems degree was redesigned to enhance the experiential learning of students by focusing it on a three-semester community-based system development project. The entire curriculum was then redesigned to have a project-centric focus with each course in the curriculum contributing to the success of students’ learning experiences. Implementation of this new design involved an evolutional enhancement from an existing traditional curriculum with modifications proceeding in stages over a four-year period. Early on, it was recognized that the curriculum redesign was progressing through a series of stages similar to that encountered in software engineering processes. As a result, the general guidelines and framework developed for continuous improvement in software engineering: the Capability Maturity Model were adopted and modified for guiding the curriculum redesign. This paper presents a description of the authors’ experiences in implementing a curriculum redesign from one based on a traditional course-based design to a project-centric design using the Capability Maturity Model as a process improvement tool. Our successful experience with using this tool suggests a need for the development of a specialized process improvement tool for future use on similar curriculum redesign

ENHANHANCE LEARNING EXPERIENCES IN AN ACCOUNTING CURRICULUM WITH COMMUNITY-LEARNING PROJECTS

Abstract Accounting programs across the country have been challenged to better prepare students for the accounting profession. In contrast to the traditional approach to accounting education which stressed calculating one right answer, the new focus emphasizes dealing with unstructured problems and preparing students with real world experiences through experiential learning, community service learning and project-based collaborating learning. The Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) notes that students should be active participants in the learning process and not passive recipients of information. This research-in-progress paper described the courses design in an accounting curriculum with community engagement projects and their theoretical background

ENHANHANCE LEARNING EXPERIENCES IN AN ACCOUNTING CURRICULUM WITH COMMUNITY-LEARNING PROJECTS

Accounting programs across the country have been challenged to better prepare students for the accounting profession. In contrast to the traditional approach to accounting education which stressed calculating one right answer, the new focus emphasizes dealing with unstructured problems and preparing students with real world experiences through experiential learning, community service learning and project-based collaborating learning. The Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) notes that students should be active participants in the learning process and not passive recipients of information. This research-in-progress paper described the courses design in an accounting curriculum with community engagement projects and their theoretical background