Challenging Students: Reflections on the Development and Delivery of an Undergraduate Module That Introduces the Full Systems Development Life Cycle

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2006 by McRobb, Steve

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the experience of developing and teaching an innovative, experimental undergraduate module in Information Systems Development. The module aims to give first year students a rounded experience of systems development from feasibility to evaluation. Students produce a series of analysis and design products that lead, finally, to the implementation of a distributed 3-tier web-based prototype system. Many staff regard this as overambitious, since most of the students are completely new to systems analysis and design and are concurrently learning the rudiments of programming and web development in other modules. The paper discusses the institutional and educational pressures that led to the conception and development of such a demanding module. It describes the process of negotiation and compromise through which the module came into being. And it explains the support mechanisms that have been developed to make it possible for students to succeed. Results are presented that indicate the module succeeds in several ways. It lays a useful practical foundation for later studies and work. It gives scope and encouragement for abler students to excel. And its support mechanisms help weaker students to exceed their own expectations by acquiring skills and understanding that they think at first are beyond their reach. The paper closes by summarizing the key lessons learned by the author, which include insights into the use of scaffolding and formative assessment to motivate students, and a greater willingness to experiment.

Keywords: Project, Methodology, Systems Analysis and Design, Systems Development

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes text missing in the original.)

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper describes the commissioning, development and delivery of a module called INFO1401 'Information Systems Development' - a first year undergraduate module delivered as a core part of several degree courses at De Monttbrt University, UK. (De Montfort, or DMU, is a large institution geographically at the centre of England, and also near the middle of the UK University league tables). The history of this module illustrates many of the pressures and constraints that affect the teaching of systems development today. It is also innovative and experimental in a number of ways.

The paper has some of the character of a research report, and includes some elements of empirical research. But what follows was not planned as research and followed no proper methodology. Some statistical analysis is presented, but this is really intended only to support some general points about pass rates and grade profiles.

The pedagogic approach of the module can be rooted in the constructivist literature. For example, the teaching and assessment rationale has a clear basis in Vygostsky, especially the "scaffolding" of learning (Vygostsky, 1978). The module's assessment strategy also has strong links with Kolb's learning cycle (Kolb, 1984) as it encourages students to move from practical experience and experimentation to reflection and conceptualization. However, the discussion that follows will make no further explicit reference to theory. Most of the work was simply undertaken as a normal part of the author's daily duties as a lecturer, course leader and module developer, and the paper has been written as a reflective report on practice, not a theoretical discussion. Regardless of its classification, it is hoped that readers will gain useful insights from the story.

INFO1401 seeks to convey a rounded experience of information systems analysis, design, implementation and evaluation, using an extended case study and practical lab work as the basis for a series of group coursework deliverables that reflect typical lifecycle phase products. Alongside this, a traditional series of lectures and tutorials explains the context and the techniques of systems development, and gives students the chance to practice and get feedback on their work.

Much of the delivery is conventional, especially the early coverage of information systems, project lifecycles, project management, analysis and design techniques and so on. But two aspects are quite experimental, and these are the main focus of the paper. First, there is the distributed web architecture of the software prototype that students design and build. Second, there is the assessment process. Key points to emphasize are that the module challenges students by setting them tasks that some consider far too ambitious for first year students, and that it makes creative use of assessment to support students through the most challenging of these tasks.

INFO1401 is a key module, whose role is to integrate a student's experience of his or her course. It tries to fit techniques acquired on other modules into a coherent approach to systems development. Teaching systems analysis and design is anyway a difficult task. There are complex interdependencies between the various elements, and where more than one person is involved, a coherent and reasonably consistent approach must be found that reflects the skills and interests of the participants. This paper documents how a small team negotiated their way past obstacles and through the many compromises encountered in an attempt to find a new way of doing this. Two key themes stand out from the experience, each a dialectic of opposing tensions.