Innovating Business Systems Labs for Engaging iGeneration Students

We present the design, implementation and impact of an innovative new approach to delivering hands-on lab experiences to address the challenge of engaging iGeneration students. In the Business Systems and Policy course, a core requirement for most Business programs, we aimed to leverage the iGeneration’s affinity for “storification” and social media to enhance their engagement and, by extension, their learning. The labs are cast as a series of class blog entries written by a fictional student peer, a young woman named “Max,” who stumbles into an opportunity to work for a local Silicon Valley startup, building a mobileintegrated app to help them search for venture capital funding. As the story unfolds, she relates the business challenges and how she learns to meet them, step-by-step, with cloud-based Salesforce.com. Using free accounts, students follow along, “concretizing” IS concepts. We share lessons learned and preliminary evidence of engagement, satisfaction and learning impacts.