2nd course on “Advanced eBusiness” and collected “textbook”

Z. Putnik & Z. Budimac

2/22

Introduction

• Depending on the direction they are studying, students of DMI in Novi Sad, have ONE, TWO, or THREE elective seminars during their studies.

• Those elective seminars are situated in their II, III, and IV year of studies.

3/22

Introduction

• Every year, lecturers from DMI offer topics to be covered through this course. So far, we had for example:– eLearning / Advanced eLearning– Mobile agents / Multi-agent systems– Prince and PMBOK in software project management– Selected topics in software/hardware development– Web mining– XML databases– .NET technologies– Combinatorial algorithms– Symbolic calculus …

4/22

Introduction

• A need to cover a great number of students and offer them good seminars is obligatory:

– II, III, and IV year has more than 200 students regularly enrolled + who-knows-how-many “old” students repeating their studies.

– as mentioned, one direction has 2, and one direction even 3 elective seminars during their studies.

– As a consequence, there are more than 300 students enrolled for some of the courses.

5/22

Introduction

• Most of the mentioned courses, require some pre-knowledge:– “Prince and PMBOK” – requirement is exam in “Software Project

Management”– “XML databases” – exam in “Databases”– “(Advanced) eLearning” – exam in “Software Engineering”– …

• II year students do not fulfill these requirements! There is no suitable course for them (that they like )!

6/22

In addition

• As a part of TEMPUS project for Joint Master studies, a significant number of courses had to be developed.

• One of those was “Advanced e-Business”.

• Consortium of project members developed a guide what a course should cover, and enumerated general list of topics it should contain.

7/22

In addition

• Course material was developed consisting of:– Presentations covering 7 topics, with around 400 slides

– Set of group assignments for assessment by lecturer

– Set of individual assignments:• several for self-assessment• several for assessment by lecturer

– Text covering exam principles

• Missing? A book, obviously!

8/22

Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness”

• Students of “Business informatics” direction have an obligatory exam at their I year of studies “Introduction to eBusiness”.

• Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness” was offered to students of the III and IV year of all directions, and for II year of “Business informatics” direction during 2007/08.

• Because of good experiences, we offered it again in 2008/09.

9/22

Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness”

• Course was adjusted to abilities and limitations of graduate students:

– One whole topic, and parts of other topics considered too advanced, were skipped.

– Instead of using individual and team assignments, a list of topics covered during the lectures was offered, from which student has to select one, and write a seminar paper on the topic.

10/22

Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness”

• Course was adjusted to abilities and limitations of graduate students:

– Certain technical rules about seminar papers were set (size, shape, rules and requirements ...)

– A set of around 40 ebooks / or around 300 MB of freely available material was given to students.

– In addition, students were encouragedto do some autonomous and self-directed research of the Internet, on a given topic.

11/22

Results

• During the first run in 2007/08, we had around 30 students enrolled – and excellent result for the first run of any elective course.

• Yet – “only” 19 finished they obligation within given time-frame, and produced a seminar paper coveringone of the offered topics.

• There is a visible difference in quality, maturity and even literacy of material developed by students of the II year, and students of the IV year.

12/22

Results

• Maybe, just maybe, course is too advanced for the students of the II year.

• What’s more problematic – not being able to create original material of satisfactory quality– students of II year more often than the other students – used copy+pastetechnique in their work.

13/22

Results

• And what’s the most problematic thing – event though they had “Ethical aspects of informatics” as a course in their studies, a lot of them forgot it along the way!

• It happened on several occasions that they simply copied the whole passages, several pages long, from some doctoral/master thesis.

• NOT from a book … that would require translation! From some thesis published “in the neighborhood”, in

CBS speaking countries

14/22

Results

• Sadly – they didn’t have a feeling that what they done is wrong!

• “Yes – I copied it – why not? Was I not allowed?”

• Lucky for us – they do it so literally, that they get caught veeery easy!

• When a student of Hungarian nationality, somewhere in the middle of the paper, starts using “ijekavica”, (and stop using it 3 pages later), you get suspicious .

15/22

“Textbook”

• Having 19 seminar papers for 20 topics – sometimes 2-3 papers for the same topic – was not good enough for a book, but it is a start!

• What’s more – another year came!

• During the year 2008/09, we hadadditional 42 students applyingfor the course.

16/22

“Textbook”

• Situation with the finished papers is not great, but – together with students from last year who finished their papers, we currently have:

– 33 finished papers;

– 7 papers in 2nd iteration

– 32 papers … somewhere

17/22

“Textbook”

• What’s more – this situation gives us a chance to choose and pick the best of the seminar papers for each topic.

• Knowing that for each topic, we have at least 2, and up to 5-6 candidates, we estimate that final version of the “textbook” will be of a good quality.

18/22

“Textbook”

• Currently, we have an ebook, entitled “Advanced eBusiness – Learning material for Elective Seminar”, editors and authors Zoran Budimac and Zoran Putnik.

• Enumerated authors are also 19 students, on 16 topics.

19/22

“Textbook”

• The next “textbook”, that will be created sometime before the next summer semester, will hopefully cover ALL topics.

• Besides, hopefully again, we will have something to chose from, for EACH topic, thus creating us a better learning material.

20/22

What next?

• For the next summer semester, we have to decide:– should we offer this elective seminar again?

– should we, instead of seminar papers, start with originally suggested plan – individual assignments, team assignments, written or oral exam using the offered literature.

21/22

What next?

• Even before that - for the next school year in general, we have to decide:

– should we offer this course to the originally intended audience – master students?

– if offered, what should we use as a method of examination.

22/22

What next?

Any suggestions?