IS Course Success in Liberal Arts Institutions - What's the Formula?

1. INTRODUCTION This study focuses on teaching the information systems (IS) core course in a business school at a midsized university that does not offer an IS major and where there is much skepticism among the business majors as to the relevance of IS education. The issue of the relevance of IS education particularly to students not pursuing IS careers has been noted by various educators (Baugh, 2011; Hoffman and Blake, 2003; Law, 2003). Baugh (2011) puts the focus squarely on this issue in posing the question: "How do you teach it (IS) and keep the interest of your students?" Law (2003) talks about the challenges of designing IS courses for students who have no intention of pursuing vigorous IS training. The students in the business school of this institution indeed have no intention of pursuing a career in information systems. The university does have a computer science department as part of the college of arts and sciences, but that is completely separate from the business school. The target audience for the IS core course is business students in their senior or junior year, with seniors comprising about half the class, pursuing diverse majors ranging from marketing to finance to human resource management. It is this set of students who question the relevance of technical IS education to their careers, given that the prospect of starting their careers is indeed imminent for the seniors. The particular characteristics of the institutional environment are not the target of this research and are assumed as given. Rather, this study focuses on the efficacy of an IS core course that we designed and delivered, which employed a rather technical active learning approach given the non-technical culture of the institution, and on our novel approach to conceptualizing and measuring IS literacy. The motivation for the selected emphases of this research is not difficult to understand. In spite of the questions raised about the relevance of technical IS education to general business majors, it still remains incumbent upon business schools to produce students that are sufficiently IS-literate and can face the challenges of a complex, technological world. This view of the necessity of making all business students IS-literate regardless of their particular career inclinations is echoed by Tsai (2002) and the National Association of Colleges and Employers (2011). However, how to go about achieving this important objective in non-technical or less-technical institutional environments does not seem to have been addressed adequately in the published literature. We believe that this article provides valuable insight in this matter and would stimulate further research. In this article, we begin by presenting a review of the relevant literature in Section 2 where Section 2.1 discusses the notion of IS literacy and Section 2.2 reviews active learning in IS. With the discussion in Section 2.1 as a backdrop, we develop a novel holistic conceptualization of IS literacy and present it in Section 3. An innovative design of the IS core course for non-IS business majors that implements our active learning approach, which we refer to as the disaggregated mode of technology development, is presented in Section 4. A set of hypotheses to assess the effectiveness of the newly designed IS core course is developed in Section 5. The research methodology and the results on learning outcomes and the hypotheses tested are described in Sections 6 and 7, respectively. Finally, Section 8 presents the conclusions of this study. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 IS Literacy IS literacy is not about knowing how to use Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint. Instead it is about gaining knowledge of a range of topics from aligning the technology with the business to telecommunication networks to computer security (Laudon and Laudon, 2012). These topics that every business student must know have been identified by Ives et al. …