Developing Expertise in E-Commerce: A Content Analysis of Students' Knowledge of Online Auctions

Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2005 by Foster, Jonathan, Lin, Angela

Fourteen assignments consisting in total of 408 sentences were coded. A small number of sentences were not coded as they referred to content that lay outside the boundaries of the coding frame i.e. they were sentences that did not refer to either prepositional, process, or personal knowledge. Figure 1 shows the distribution of knowledge across the assignments.

Figure 1 illustrates that just over half the sentences analyzed referred to prepositional knowledge (52%); just over a quarter of the sentences referred to process knowledge (27%); and just over a fifth referred to personal knowledge or impressions of the experience of participating in an online auction (21%).

4.1 Prepositional Knowledge

Clearly students drew strongly on their prepositional knowledge when participating in the exercise. First, students used the theoretical frameworks to make sense of the phenomena that they observed in C2C e-commerce e.g. business models (23%) and concepts of e-commerce (21%) were the most frequently cited categories of prepositional knowledge. Based for example on their knowledge of a dynamic pricing model students understood and observed how a bidding process proceeds and what they could expect at the end of the bidding process. Figure 2 shows the frequency of propositional knowledge categories across the assignments expressed by sub-category.

Secondly, students used the frameworks to scrutinize their course of action, tending to use the frameworks to guide their decisions, in particular with regard to selling. Following business models and concepts of e-commerce, the other most significant categories of propositional knowledge were: market opportunity analysis (10%), interface design (10%), and dealing with transactions (8%). For example the concept of 'framing the market opportunity (Rayport and Jaworski, 2003) was used to evaluate the market competition. The result of this evaluation along with the concept of pricing strategy enabled the students to determine a fair, attractive, selling price for their products. Use of the theoretical frameworks also appears to help students recognize the potential complexity of business transactions e.g. market opportunity analysis. This could be because such frameworks equipped the students with the ability to reason why and how things worked - an ability that they had not had before. The exercise also provided students with the opportunity to draw on concepts not only taught on this module but also taught on other modules within the department. MSc Information Management students for example applied their knowledge of information search when evaluating and determining the product categories, both for the products they wanted to buy and for the ones they wanted to sell; and applied their knowledge of formulating search strategies when assessing the market and searching for the product information. This is an interesting finding because it was not our initial expectation that students would draw on their propositional knowledge from other modules in order to perform the tasks. Nevertheless, we appreciate and welcome this outcome as students demonstrated their ability to integrate and apply their propositional knowledge from different courses.