E-Commerce and the Undergraduate MIS Curricula: an Exploratory Study

Journal of Information Systems Education, Summer 2006 by Moshkovich, Helen M, Mechitov, Alexander I, Olson, David L

We can summarize our research questions as follows:

1. How many courses are usually present in the MIS major? How are they distributed between the required and elective parts of the program?

2. How often is the content connected with ecommerce/e-business knowledge and skills included in MIS curricula? How is it distributed between the required and elective parts in MIS programs?

3. DATA COLLECTION AND FINDINGS

To answer the above questions we surveyed AACSB accredited business schools in the United States with an undergraduate MIS or CIS major. The AACSB web site knowledge services (AACSB) was used to select corresponding schools.

For each institution on this list the following information was recorded: number of courses in the MIS major, number of the courses that were required, presence of courses which covered e-commerce concepts, client-side Web development, and server-side Web development. It was also noted whether corresponding e-commerce content was required in the major or was presented as an elective.

Information regarding the programs was obtained via university Web sites, published course descriptions in catalogs, and syllabi available over the internet. The process used was to look for courses with relevant names (e.g., Ecommerce, E-business, Web Design and Development, Internet Technologies, Selected Topics, etc.) and through course descriptions (content analysis) to evaluate the level of presentation of topics in the course such as e-commerce concepts, client-side Web development and/or server-side Web development. Credit was given only if in the judgment of the authors there was a considerable amount of coverage of corresponding topics. Primary content analysis of 238 schools was carried out in the spring of 2004. Relevant data available for 232 schools were recorded. In the spring of 2005 additional data collection on the number of courses in MIS major was accomplished and previously gathered information was updated. At that point data for an additional 38 newly accredited schools were found on the Web and corresponding information for these schools was added to the analysis. As a result updated data for 266 schools is used in this study. There were no significant changes for the data previously recorded for the 232 universities.

A set of general characteristics was used to profile business schools. The main characteristics were: level of research (research/teaching), ownership (private/public), size (number of graduates from a business school divided into three groups), and region (Midwest, Northeast, South, and West in accordance with the Census Bureau classification).

3.1 Number of courses in the MIS major

First, we analyzed the number of courses in the MIS major considering it to be a limitation factor in the introduction of new courses in the curricula. Figure 1 shows the percentage of schools with the corresponding number of courses in the MIS major. It is evident that nearly half of the schools use either 6 or 8 courses in the major (with an approximately equal split among them).