[AISWorld] Call for MBA IS Core Course best practices

[Galletta, Dennis]

To the AIS Community,

Some survey results have shown that the IS course tends to be ranked quite low in the set of required courses in many MBA programs, but there are many notable exceptions. We have all heard stories of universities that have paid close attention to the IS core course and elevated it to the highest-rated course in the curriculum. We have also heard from schools that have cut IS from their core curriculum, and have seen professors in our field worldwide, both tenured and untenured, lose their jobs as a result.

We have had an "enrollments" wiki page at AIS for about 4 or 5 years now. The page has suffered from dozens and dozens of spam attacks and many, but not all, of the spammers' alterations have been removed. Part of that wiki has never caught on: the "best practices" page. One notable exception is that Hope Koch has placed some valuable resources on that page: http://enrollments.aisnet.org/Best%20Practices.ashx

As we complete our 2010-2011 academic year here, it is time to reflect on what to do differently next year to keep the curriculum re-designers from continuing to bark and bite at our heels. Some notable suggestions have included weaving SAP into our course, providing more formulas and graphs (e.g., adoption curve, long tail, etc.) to be more quantitative and provide more tools for students, and using web design as a non-technical but non-trivial exercise that can be done in multiple phases.

There are, undoubtedly, many more tools and techniques that some of you have found valuable. This request is a plea to share your valuable tips so that we can all benefit from them. The more difficulties we all have with the course, the more our entire field will suffer. If the core course, for instance, disappears from many curricula, our field will shrink and wither. We will lose slots and colleagues in current programs. Those of us with PhD programs will find fewer outlets to hire our PhD students. It is time to fight back and we will benefit from sharing our best practices.

There are two groups I'm addressing:

-          The people who have success with some particular lecture/discussion/application materials

-          The people who NEED these application materials

So to avoid the wiki/spam problem, please email me with some good and tidy lectures/slides/exercises/assignments, and other materials that you think contributes positively to your course. Your overall course does not have to be highly rated, because the particular set of materials that you think is helpful is the focus. Most helpful would be single assignments/lecture plans and least helpful would be "here's my wonderful course" and just submitting a syllabus.

The best alternative will be links to your materials, rather than giant emailed PowerPoint decks, but I am not fussy and will find a way to report to all, even if it means putting them on my server. So please do not send materials you want to keep private.

DG

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis F. Galletta                      Professor of Business Administration
University of Pittsburgh                    Katz Graduate School of Business
342 Mervis Hall                                        Pittsburgh, PA  15260
Phone +1 412-648-1699                                    Fax +1 412-648-1693
E-mail: galletta @                                         homepage:
        katz.pitt.edu                                 www.pitt.edu/~galletta<http://www.pitt.edu/~galletta>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aisnet.org/pipermail/aisworld_lists.aisnet.org/attachments/20110503/c9f8ce75/attachment.htm>