Teaching with technology

So, today I was thinking about how I use technology in my classroom and/or assignments. It's pretty typical in an intro MIS course to use MS Access to introduce students to databases. Excel is also a pretty common application - you can use it to teach ways to create simple decision support systems -  build a predictive model of stock prices, use pivot tables to do what if analysis, for example. But what about other things that might be useful in the working world?

In my class, there are several group assignments. This means, students need to learn how to collaborate. Despite my expectations, they don't actually already know how to use tools such as wikis or GoogleDocs to create content in a collaborative way. They stick with passing Word documents back and forth and seem to rely on the ability to meet in person. This is crazy - the world doesn't work like this anymore. I regularly collaborate with people all across North America. For a short time one summer (as a PhD student), I was working on a project with 4 people spread across 3 continents; one person in China, one in Turkey, one in Alberta (western Canada) and I was in western NY at a conference. Sure, it was a time-zone mess, but we had work to be done and timeliness mattered (I really felt for my colleague in China as he had just finished teaching all day and had to wait around until 9pm his time to connect with us).

What to do? Well, I guess I see it as my job to help students learn how to collaborate in new ways. I mean, I teach them about the need for collaboration and what types of applications might be used to collaborate, but I've never required them to actually use any of these tools before. And, like all time-pressed individuals, they just won't try something new if they don't have to. I guess it's about managing risk & reward - too risky to try a new way of working.

New this term, then, I have implemented a wiki (http://is251.openlearner.com) where each group will be developing their strategic IT report project. Here, they'll be writing about a company, identifying it's strategy, performing a value chain analysis, discovering the current IS in use and, ultimately, making some suggestions for future IS initiatives that make sense given the corporate strategy. The students will be presenting their findings in class (part of teaching them to be comfortable making presentations), but they'll be working together in public on content creation. Wish me luck.

Business Strategy & why IT folks should care about it.

So, in teaching IS251 here at Loyola, we require students to find and post stories to an online site called Microsations.com. It's a bit like Reddit; they must post a link then have 255 characters to summarize it. I wish I could say this was my bright idea, but it belongs to my colleague, Paul Di Gangi. Ideally, the summary will explain how this story relates the 3 key resources in information systems - People, Information & Technology (at least, according to the text we use). I happen to be a "people, process, technology" proponent, myself. Whatever.

Anyhow, this week students are tasked with finding stories related to business strategy. It's not surprising that they're struggling with this a bit. First off, we have started lecturing on strategy yet. Secondly, they haven't taken a business strategy class yet, either. So, we're seeing lots of stories that are more along the lines of marketing strategies. It's good for me, it will provide many teachable moments. :-)

But, why do we bother even looking at business strategy in an IS/IT course? Well, it's the classic Business-IT alignment argument. And before we can discuss the right IS choices for a firm, we really need to be sure we understand what that firm does - what it aspires to be and how it plans to make money. So, for this course, we focus on Porter's 3 generic strategies (low cost, focus, product differentiation) with some minor variations. We also talk about Value Disciplines from Treacy & Wiersema  as another way of looking at these generic strategies. Where Porter takes a market-centric view in defining his strategies, Treacy & Wiersema shift to a customer-centric focus.

The first lectures will centre around understanding the business so that we can find the appropriate IS solutions to support business goals. This is why I ended up studying in a business school - I'm an IT person who really does think technology is cool. But I recognized that just because something is cool, doesn't mean it's worth spending time or money on, from the organization's perspective anyhow. Technology has to support what we want to do, it has to help the organization deliver on it's strategy in some way be that through reducing cost or opening up new products/services that delight the customer (who will then pay!).

What I learned from my students' projects

This is a follow-up post to the one where I asked for people to take my students' surveys last term. I had hoped to write it right after they submitted their projects, but the great marking monster swallowed all my time last term. So, the first think I learned, don't make 2 major projects due days before the final exam. You'll spend all your waking hours marking. And, to me, the worst part of teaching is marking.

Anyhow, what did I learn? Maybe I should start with what did they learn?

Some of the students let their survey respondents fill in answers. You know, free-form text. They learned this is a very bad plan. If you let someone write in their choice of university, you'll get answers like:

• Loyola
• Loyola University
• Loyola University Maryland
• MIT
• UofA
• U Alberta
• ...

A couple of problems that become obvious when you see all the data - there can be many ways of referring to the same school (not including the typos), and some of the names are a bit ambiguous. There is more than one school called Loyola (although in the context, it's pretty safe to guess everyone meant Loyola University Maryland). And, there is more than one school with the abbreviation UofA (U. Alberta, U. Arizona...others?). So, disambiguation becomes a bit of a nuisance - and they had to clean their data if they wanted to use it.

The second problem? Well, where do you stop? They lost control of what schools they would need to look up information about. So, a better approach is to identify the schools you're interested in comparing and then giving your survey respondents a list to choose from. If you really want, you can have an "other" category, but then that becomes different information for you to consider.

In the reports that students wrote, this free-form text issue was the number 1 problem they identified.

Now, for me, what did I learn? One thing I didn't learn was the free-form text problem. I actually left that one out for them to discover. Nothing teaches like experience.

• I (re)learned that technology is unpredictable - you think you have the possible problems sorted out, but that's just because you haven't tried enough things yet. 
• Sometimes what we intend isn't what the student hears.
• Everyone leaves things to the last minute. Yep, I was marking things as late as I could just as many students were clearly writing things as late as they could. 
• My instructions really need to be simplified.

The last point is the one I'm working on this term. Even as I'm piling on the technology - new tools to try to help with collaboration and communication. We'll see how things go.