Teaching with a Scalable, Multidisciplinary Learning Object: A Business School Case Study

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2005 by Klobas, Jane E

ABSTRACT

This article describes a multimedia case study that was conceived as a high level learning object, reusable in different disciplines, and scalable in that it can be used for teaching at different levels in each discipline. Design principles for a reusable, scalable multidisciplinary learning object illustrate how the case study can be used in different ways. Use of the case for teaching MBA students about systems, IT infrastructure and network components, and frameworks for use by non-technical managers called on to make IT decisions is described. This description includes the learning goals, the lesson plan, and evaluation of the learning object and the lessons in which it was incorporated. The author concludes that use of the two design principles - separation of application from abstraction, and instructor-guided learning about abstraction - enabled production of a learning object that could be incorporated effectively in classroom teaching for MBA students in the core course.

Keywords: Learning object, scalability, reusability, evaluation, computer networks, decision making

1. INTRODUCTION

Teachers of the required information systems course in business degrees often lament the difficulty of motivating those students in the class to study a subject that is of little or no intrinsic interest to them. Much of the literature of information systems education is concerned with techniques for engaging and motivating such students.

One technique for engaging students is narrative or 'story telling' (Plowman, Luckin, Laurillard, Stratford, and Taylor, 1999). The classic form of narrative in management teaching is the context-rich case study, used with particular success by Harvard Business School. While there is a growing body of case studies in information systems, these tend to address managerial rather than technical lessons. Technical fields such as engineering do not yet have a tradition of narrative in teaching. Instead, they rely primarily on the solving of problems which are extracted from real-world contexts (Jonassen, 2004). Nonetheless, the success of narrative in fields such as mathematics (Papadimitriou, 2003) has attracted the attention of engineering teachers who need to prepare their students for a world in which they work with complex problems in real organizations.

The work described in this article draws on the joint efforts of teachers of information systems and information technology to business students and managers, and teachers of network operation and management to engineering students and technical staff, to develop a multimedia case study that could be used to teach about networks in a realistic business context.

Production of a case study, particularly a multimedia case study, can be a costly and time-consuming exercise, with economics more akin to the preparation of a chapter for a text book than a single class activity (Downes, 2000). It makes sense, then, to develop case studies that can be used in as many contexts as possible, at different levels of complexity, and even across disciplines. In this article, we describe how a multimedia case study can be conceived as a high level learning object and designed in such a way that it can be reused across different learning contexts; we describe an example of such a case study / learning object; and we describe how it was used successfully in teaching of nontechnical MBA students in their information systems course.

2. DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The learning object was conceived as a case study in order to achieve the benefits of narrative in learning. In particular, we sought to involve students in the problems they would be directed by the teacher to solve, motivating them to address problems that they might otherwise consider too complex or too technical.

Two design principles were adopted to ensure that the case study could be used across different learning contexts (Klobas, Renzi, Giordano, and Sementina, 2004):

1) The principle of separation of application from abstraction.

2) The principle of instructor-guided learning about abstraction.

The elements of a lesson can be divided into an abstraction the concept or idea to be taught, in its most general terms, and an application - the ability to apply the concept or idea to solve a given problem or in a given situation (Laurillard, 2002). Most learning objects combine abstraction and application, for example, by incorporating tests within the object (Cisco Systems, 2003). In the case study described here, the abstraction was omitted from the learning object, leaving the teacher responsible for abstractions, i.e. for guiding students to learn lessons that were appropriate to the field and level of study in which the lessons are to be learned.

3. THE case

The case study describes the problems faced by a company, New Tech, that has increased the size and complexity of its computer systems. Students are introduced to the organization at a time when the organization's network seems to have broken down completely and users are complaining "I cannot access ...", "I cannot work".