Mitigating Negative Behaviors in Student Project Teams: An Information Technology Solution

The evolution of the information systems (IS) profession as well as the IS educational environment has resulted in student project teams becoming an increasingly important component of IS education. Negative behaviors within these project teams result in less than optimal project outcomes and confound attempts to fairly evaluate individual efforts within the team. These negative behaviors can also result in unfavorable perceptions of the educational experience for many students. An information technology-based application consisting of an online interactive activity log and an online peer review system was developed to mitigate the common negative behaviors of social loafing and free riding and provide more accurate and useful information for evaluation. Its successful implementation in a specific classroom environment is discussed and evidence of its efficacy is supplied in the form of subjective assessment by the instructors and the results of a survey measuring student perceptions of the system

The Effectiveness of Computer-Based Game Show Formats in Survey Courses: A Quasi-Experiment

The confluence of computers and integrated projection systems in the classroom has opened new avenues for course content delivery in an active learning format. This paper first discusses the concepts of active learning and play in a pedagogical context. Next, the implementation and subjective results of a generic computer-based game show for delivering course content in introductory survey courses is presented. This paper then describes the employed methodology and statistically tests certain aspects of the course related to the effectiveness of this implementation. The results of this quasi-experiment using five sections of an upper-division MIS (Management Information Systems) survey course spanning three academic terms strongly support the research hypotheses that the game show format increases student learning and improves student perceptions of the overall quality of the course. The implications of this research for educators are discussed. The game show application was developed by the authors and is available for download as freeware

Determinants of Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use in Individual Adoption of Social Network Sites

A large-scale online survey (n=1327) was utilized to investigate determinants of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as well as other effects on the formation of a behavioral intention to use social network sites (SNS). Findings show that need-based motivations such as social deficit, communication need, and community need do positively impact perceived usefulness while hedonic need and contribution need do not. Additionally, perceived ease of use was affected by technologyoriented self-efficacy. Trust and privacy considerations impacted perceived usefulness as well, while external threats to security did not. Finally, age and gender effects on the underlying technology acceptance model constructs were also explored