Collaborative Project Across Three Hong Kong Universities: A Case Study in E-Commerce Education

Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2005 by Ngai, Eric W T, Lok, Chun Kit, Ng, Eugenia M W, Lo, C N, Wong, Yun K

Phase 4 - online shopping. Each group was given HK$10,000 in e-cash. The students then acted as customers and were asked to visit other e-shops to buy their products/services. The students could browse the e-shops on their own time and experience online shopping, as most of them had no previous experience in shopping online.

Phase 5 - online peer and tutor evaluations and submission of reports. We believe that it is important to assess what we teach and what the students learn. The online peer and tutor evaluation system can be formative (for learning), where the emphasis is on online feedback; and can be summative (for grading), for an evaluation of work performance. The online marking system could be accessed online (http://en.mgt.polyu.edu.hk:8080/OMS_Peer). The students were asked to submit a debriefing report after the game had ended. They were expected to cover the e-shop setup and performance, specify what they had learned from this project, and describe the difficulties they had encountered. Details of the description of the platform design and system architecture are mentioned in (Ngai, 2004).

4. EVALUATION

The project-based teamwork game in EC described above was evaluated based on the feedback of the students, who came from three tertiary institutes in Hong Kong. Student views and feedback were obtained using a formal questionnaire. The evaluations by the students were used to help determine the acceptability of the project in terms of the following four criteria: (1) the effectiveness of the project-based teamwork assignment in helping develop skills and knowledge, (2) the usability of the system, (3) attitudes toward the system platform, and (4) attitudes toward the project assignment. The effectiveness, usability, and attitudes toward the system and towards the project were measured using a five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 3 = undecided, 5 = strongly agree). By measuring the effectiveness of the system, we were able to judge whether the project had succeeded in accomplishing its objectives or mission. The items employed to measure the usability of the system reflected the usefulness and ease of use of the system and the project. It was therefore possible to assess the satisfaction of the users as one potential indicator of the success of the project-based teamwork game in EC.

The project-based teamwork game was first introduced to the 110 undergraduate students enrolled in the course, "E-commerce for Management" at PolyU. These students were second- and third-year business students enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program in Business Studies/Management/Marketing. Three hours of classes were held per week (2 hours of lectures 1 hour of tutorial), with a total of 14 class meetings. All of the students had already taken "IT for Business" as their first IT course in the first year of study. Most of the students had no prior programming experience.

A project-based teamwork game was given to the students as one of the assignments in the EC course. A total of 25 teams were formed to design and develop 25 e-shops. The evaluation form was distributed to students who had taken on this project at the end of the course.