Enterprise Integration in Business Education: Design and Outcomes of a Capstone ERP-based Undergraduate e-Business Management Course

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2004 by Davis, Charles H, Comeau, Jana

We severely underestimated the time required to troubleshoot the system throughout the course. Errors during setup would prevent students from successful completion of their exercises and would create problems during course delivery. Following configuration of the clients by an instructor, extensive testing must be carried and actual transactions performed. In our Enterprise Integration course the burden of testing was borne by the two instructors and the three TAs, who worked two to three weeks ahead of the rest of the class in the course exercises in order to identify configuration problems before the exercises were performed in the classroom. This rigorous pre-testing of the configuration immediately before use of the system in the lab environment was also necessary in order to identify and correct discrepancies between the laboratory exercises and the SAP interface and command structure. The exercises were designed for SAP R/3 4.6C and had to be adapted for the 4.6B environment used by the software hosting institution. This required tedious checking of nomenclature, operational sequence and exercise descriptions. Failure to identify such differences created confusion amongst the students, and resulted in an inordinate of amount of time expended to clarify the issue.

To encourage group learning among students we introduced a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) discussion board on the course management website with subheadings for each group of exercises. Instructors and Teaching Assistants shared responsibility to monitor this board and reply to questions between 8 am and midnight seven days a week. A number of students also offered solutions to problems posted on the discussion board. With instructors' knowledge of the Dolphin course limited to around two hundred hours of experience, many questions from students about the system or other modules could not be answered. The only way to deal with this potentially stressful situation is to emphasize to the students that even SAP Jedi only know a small fraction of the system. This sets the stage for a collaborative learning environment.

Finally, although we were able to solve many problems that occurred, we frequently required recourse to the technical expertise of the original course designers from the Dolphin Group. Without this support we would have experienced significant difficulties.

Perhaps the most perplexing teaching challenge in the lab component involved the testing of the student knowledge of the system. In the final lab session, students were asked to complete various transaction-based exercises in their test environments, with the understanding that if properly configured, their companies would successfully generate the corresponding transaction numbers. This apparently reasonable means of testing students has drawbacks: how can instructors differentiate between student errors and a system error caused by faulty or corrupt data? The other concern with this assessment method is to determine whether it tested students' understanding of business processes or merely their ability to follow instructions in the configuration exercises. It appears that students with the most fully operational company configurations had a better grasp of the SAP R/3 system's functionality, but it is not clear how well students learned about the underlying business processes.