Facilitating students' learning outcome of business processes using an ERP

A recurring problem when teaching Business Process Orientation (BPO) is the difficulty students have connecting conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge. Literature suggests that one solution is to combine different forms of learning, such as hand-on exposure to enterprise resource planning (ERP) together with traditional teaching. This article presents a three step teaching case designed by the authors in order to explore students’ learning outcome by using ERP systems together with BPO. The learning outcome of the students was analysed with a focus on connections between conceptual and procedural knowledge. Using Bloom’s revised taxonomy we were able to identify connections between students’ conceptual and procedural knowledge together with the cognitive processes of understanding, applying and analysing. The result indicates that applying procedural knowledge in an ERP facilitates the students’ ability to understand, analyse and evaluate based on conceptual knowledge such as business process orientation.