Three Design Principles for eCommerce Curricular Initiatives

University educators, particularly those in schools of business, face a dilemma in adapting their curriculum to e-commerce. Some schools have created new degree programs while others have opted to infuse existing courses with e-Commerce topics. Given the strong demand for e-Commerce education among students and industry, balancing speed with a strong end state plan is necessary for effective curricular change. This essay overviews the main issues in steering these changes

DO SEQUENCE AND CONCURRENCY MATTER?: An Investigation of Order and Timing Effects on Student Learning of Programming Languages

IS educators often struggle with curriculum issues including timeliness and completeness of the curriculum. While model curricula suggest that programming courses should be a part of an IS undergraduate degree, little guidance is offered as to the order and timing of these courses. A longitudinal survey of students in programming courses was used to assess whether sequence or concurrency explained any variance in perceptual performance measures. Sequence of programming courses did not hinder student performance, and concurrency actually improved performance for Visual Basic. Insights from the study provide guidance for curricular design issues regarding the sequencing and timing of programming courses

Why Unizin?

The formal launch of Unizin begins an exciting new chapter for Digital Education and a path for universities to shape our future. We have been fortunate to be among the many who have shaped the ideas that form Unizin, and our institutions are among the earliest universities to join. Our goals and purpose in endorsing Unizin are simple: As professors and members of the academy, we want to support faculty and universities by ensuring that universities and their faculty stay in control of the content, data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we look at the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables digital learning, we want to bias things in the direction of open standards, interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about tipping the table in favor of the academy by collectively owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the essential infrastructure that enables digital learning on our campuses and beyond

THE EFFECTS OF RESTRICTIVENESS AND PREFERENCE FOR PROCEDURAL ORDER ON THE APPROPRIATION OF GROUP DECISION HEURISTICS IN A GSS ENVIRONMENT

This research examines two research questions. First, does restrictiveness (i.e., the manner in which use of group resources is limited or channeled) (Silver 1988, 1990; DeSanclis et al. 1989) influence group performance and member perceptions as measured by decision quality and satisfaction? Second, does the composition of a GSS supported group in terms of individual preference for procedural order (PPO) (Putnam 1979) influence group performance and member perceptions? 7\u27his research tests and extends the Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) (Poole and DeSanctis 1990). AST argues that GSSs are a social technology through which groups may choose to faithfully or ironically appropriate GSS structures. The PPO construct was also examined in this research. The PPO construct suggests that individuals enter group work with predispositions for particular work habits. For instance. High Procedural Order (HPO) individuals prefer planned, sequential patterns of organizing task activities and will seek to structure activities by sending procedural messages while Low Procedural Order (LPO) individuals send fewer procedural messages and prefer a cyclical ordering of activities. We suggest lhat a group member\u27 s PPO may be an important source of contextual structures for the appropriation processes described by AST. A laboratory experiment was conducted to evaluate the impacts of GSS- and facilitator-based restrictiveness on group processes and outcomes. The independent variables in this study were restrictiveness and the group\u27s PPO composition. Twenty-eight 5-member groups composed entirely of all HPO individuals (fourteen groups) or all LPO individuals (fourteen groups) were randomly assigned to either a restrictive or nonrestrictive treatment. The restrictive treatment was operationalized by activating three sources of restrictiveness: user-based training, facilitator-based process guidance, and GSS-based (via a level-2 GSS - VisionQuest™). The nonrestrictive treatment did not specifically impose any form of restricliveness. The comprehensive heuristic was a modification of Dewey\u27s (1910) reflective thinking process. The $OB Policy Task. a hidden profile task (Stasser 1992), was developed and used for this experimenL This task is designed so that information from all members is essential for identifying the dominant problems and for finding a jointly acceptable solution. In tenns of decision quality. an ANOVA found no significant difference between groups in each of the treatment conditions; however, the trends in the data are suggestive and imply that I-PO groups in the non-reslrictive condition tend to produce better quality solutions (F = 1.594. p = 0.219). Further. a one-way analysis for groups in the non-restrictive condition across the PPO dimension approached significance (F = 3.0846; p = 0.105) and suggests that groups composed of LPO me:nbers performed this task better than groups composed of }IPO members, Results for satisfaction (Green and Taber 1980) indicate that I IPO group members reported greater participation in the discussion (F = 12.27, p = 0.001), that they were more satisfied with their group\u27s solution (F = 10.94, p = 0.001), and that they were also more satisfied with the process than were LPO members (F = 6.61, p = 0.011). No significant difference was identified for participation in terms of the restrictiveness treatment; however, groups in the restrictive condition were more satisfied with the solution (F = 5.78, p = 0.018) and with the process (F = 6.43, p = 0.012). In terms of qualitative results, the facilitators noted that groups in the non-restrictive treatment generally could not or chose not to appropriate the heuristic. Even when groups requested the GSS tool specified by the heuristic, they often misappropriated the heuristic or the GSS. These preliminary results are intriguing and suggest that PPO is a useful construct for understanding how group members appropriate and react to GSS technology and structured heuristics. A better understanding of the intlicacies and differences in this appropriation process in the various conditions will be gained Lhrough a detailed examination of the decision-making process adopted by each group

Making the Business Case for IT Investments Through Facts, Faith, and Fear

This Teaching Note and the accompanying business cases (Consumer Products International and Biogenetica) were prepared Professors Bradley C. Wheeler and George M. Marakas of Indiana University (1999)Business cases are an essential document for organizational investments in information technologies (IT). Yet, many organizations lack formal methods for writing, understanding, and acting on business cases. Similarly, IS courses have often struggled to adequately teach what students how to write business cases. The following are two actual business cases that were drawn from work with a real company. They are unaltered in any way except for disguising the name of the company. The use of two cases allows students to learn by contrasting the merits of grounding IT investments in arguments of fact, faith, or fear. A detailed teaching note is also provided. The cases have been used effectively with multiple MBA and Executive Education audiences

On Assessment of Project Success in Community Source Development

Community source has emerged as a unique way of developing enterprise software systems that require significant investments from partnering organizations. This new way of software engineering raises new questions on the issue of successful project development, which are significantly different from previous studies. The objective of this study is to develop a model for assessing project success under community source development. In this paper, we present a case of community source project called Kuali to understand the research questions, propose a unique research model for a survey study, outline the related hypotheses, and discuss our data collection methodology. We believe that our study is unique and will have significant impact on the successful introduction of the community source approach to enterprise application development

Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability: Report from an NSF-funded workshop

Contributing writers: Guy Almes, Amy Apon, Geoffrey Brown, David Lifka, Andrew Lumsdaine, Marlon Pierce, Beth Plale, Ruth Pordes, Craig A. Stewart, Von Welch1, Bradley C. Wheele