A Framework towards Assessing the Merits of Inviting IT Professionals to the Classroom

Introduction Many IS professional society curriculum reports stress the fact that IS students must be exposed to broad business and real world perspectives. For instance, the 2002 ACM/AIS/AITP Information Systems undergraduate curriculum report (Gorgone, Davis, Valacich, Topi, Feinstein, & Longenecker, 2002) asserts that there is a growing need to maintain an ongoing dialogue with IS professionals to improve the curriculum and the educational experience of students. It confirms that invited guest speakers, internships and advisory board members provide means to revitalize this dialogue. Though the general merits of inviting industry professionals have been confirmed in many previous (non IT-related) studies, guest speaker events (thereafter abbreviated as GS events) are particularly much needed in the IT field. Maglitta (1996) reported that IS programs are struggling to keep up-to-date with the latest technologies and changes. GS events are seen as tools to bring about the needed changes in IT education. This can potentially help IT schools remedy the current limitations of their programs keeping pace with the complex and constantly changing IT profession and its environment. In fact, IT differs from many other disciplines in its dramatic changing nature. Many questions are being raised on what knowledge and skills should be taught in a field where new technologies and terminologies flourish and disappear. Unfortunately, the pace of change in curriculum redesign is lagging behind the rate of change in the IT field. For instance there has been a constant change in the selection of the most appropriate and up-to-date programming languages for IT applications. Further, the role of IT in supporting business strategies and operations has been evolving rapidly for the past years and will certainly continue to change. Trends such as near-shore and off-shore outsourcing of IT services and products, and the efficient usage of IT for business process re-engineering are still not well grasped by students. GS events can provide a means to supplement conventional teaching to expose students to recent trends and emerging technologies and practices. Kim, Shim and Yoon (1999) found that IS practitioners perceive managerial and organizational issues as being more important than educators do. They recommend that educators and practitioners should have a shared vision of key IS issues and collaborate on curriculum development by incorporating industry needs into the curriculum. This can also contribute towards narrowing the gap between what IT schools teach and what the practitioners in the field require. Previous research has shown that in a business educational context, students have a tendency to rate much lower any activities failing to relate directly to industry (Sivan, Leung, Woon, & Kember, 2000). Students also demand a better balance between theory and practice and, in most cases, the use of guest speakers and real-life case studies remains the most popular suggestion (Clarke & Gibson-Sweet, 1998). Students also enjoy listening to professionals telling real work stories, especially when companies usually discard valuable information that universities cannot afford or that textbooks will not cover (Gustafson, 1998). Another factor that favors the need for guest speakers in IT programs is the wide spectrum of 'often blurred' career choices available for IT graduates. In fact the focus on professional orientation has generally been implicit in most IT curriculums. GS events provide a means to make such focus more explicit. The issue of exploring the many facets of inviting guest speakers into the classroom becomes even more significant when we acknowledge that poorly planned GS events will not only fail to fulfill their intended objectives, but can also lead to upsetting outcomes (Shore, 1993; Sniezek, 2005; Wortman, 1992). Thus it is one of the contributions of this research to establish a general framework to plan GS events and assess their learning outcomes. …

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