An Introductory Course in an UndergraduateE-commerce Technology Degree Program

Amber SettleAssistant Professor

CTI, DePaul University

ISECONNovember 2, 2001

2

Outline

• School of CTI at DePaul University• Undergraduate e-commerce technology program• ECT 250: Survey of e-commerce technology course

Web development sequence A balanced approach Course overview

• Future in the undergraduate CTI programs

3

DePaul CTISchool of Computer Science, Telecommunications,and Information Systems:

• Faculty size (Fall 2001)– 80 full-time faculty– 100+ part-time faculty

• Enrollments (Spring 2001)– Undergraduate: 1575– Graduate (M.S.): 2096– Ph.D.: 40

• Undergraduate programs: CS, CGA, ECT, HCI, IS , NT

• Graduate programs: CS, CGA, DS, ECT, HCI, IS, SE, TDC.

4

E-commerce technology

• M.S. in E-commerce technology– Introduced in September 1999– See related papers: Knight 2001– Generated undergraduate interest

• B.S. in E-commerce technology– Introduced in September 2000– Focus areas include: Programming, user-

centered interface design, system design,technology of databases, networking, andmiddleware.

– Enrollment (September 2001): 65

5

Web development

Web development courses in the B.S. in ECT:1. ECT 250: Survey of e-commerce technology2. ECT 270: Client-side Web application development

i. HTMLii. Cascading Style Sheetsiii. DHTML using JavaScript

3. ECT 353: Server-side Web application developmentDevelopment of small-scale e-commerce transactionapplications. Current technologies: ASP, VBScript.

6

Introductory courses

• Breadth-first approach– General survey of important topics– See related papers:

Bagert, Marcy, and Calloni, 1995King and Barr, 1997McFall and Stegink, 1997

• Depth-first approach– A particular technology in detail– See related papers:

Mercuri, Herrmann, and Popyack, 1998Hermann and Popyack, 1994Kolesar and Allan, 1995

7

A balanced approach

• Combine breadth and depth topicsProvides a broad framework and sufficient experience to understand the significance of an area

• Finding the balance can be challenging Example: Reed 2001

• The key for ECT 250: Survey of e-commerce technologyUsing a Web development tool

8

The breadth topics

• The Internet and WWW• E-commerce hardware and software• Security• Electronic payment systems• Marketing, sales, and promotion• Purchasing, logistics, and support activities• International, ethical, and legal issues

Key themes: Importance of standards, rapidlychanging nature of the field, relative importanceof B2B vs. B2C

9

The depth topics

• FrontPage• Graphic formats• Publishing Web pages

– FTP– Telnet– Unix commands

• Markup languages• Issues surrounding frames• Web page design

Focus: Preparation for subsequent Web development courses

10

The course

• Textbook: Electronic Commerce, Schneider & Perry• Ten weeks, two lectures of 1 ½ hours per week• Lecture topics:

– Breadth: 11 lectures– Depth: 7 lectures– Midterm and final exam

• Students from CTI, Commerce, and Liberal Arts• All undergraduate class levels

11

Assignments and exams

• Weekly assignments: 8– Orientation via an e-mailed survey– Web page creation and publication

Home page, shrine page, subject page– Survey topics

E-commerce and networking basics, Webhosting options, computer forensics, basicencryption

• Comprehensive exams: 2True/false, matching, short answer, essay

12

Future

• New textbookE-commerce: Business, Technology, Society.Laudon & Traver

• Inclusion into new programsUndergraduate ECT, IS, NT (Fall 2001)

• Increase in enrollment– Fall 2000: Two sections– Fall 2001: Five sections– Winter 2002: Six sections

• A redesign of CSC 200: Survey of computertechnology

13

References• Bagert, Donald, William Marcy, and Ben Calloni, 1995, “A Successful

Five-year Experiment with a Breadth-first Introductory Course.” SIGCSE Bulletin 27(1): 116-120.

• Herrmann, Nira, and Jeffrey Popyack, 1994, “An Integrated, Software-based Approach to Teaching Introductory Computer Programming.”SIGCSE Bulletin 27(1): 92-96. [spreadsheets]

• King, L.A. Smith, and John Barr, 1997, “Computer Science for the Artist.”SIGCSE Bulletin 29(1): 150-153. [graphics]

• Kolesar, Mary, and Vicki Allan, 1995, “Teaching Computer ScienceConcepts and Problem Solving with a Spreadsheet.” SIGCSE Bulletin27(1): 10-13.

• McFall, Ryan, and Gordon Stegink, 1997, “Introductory Computer Sciencefor General Education: Laboratories, Textbooks, and the Internet.”SIGCSE Bulletin 29(1): 96-100.

• Mercuri, Rebecca, Nira Herrmann, and Jeffrey Popyack, 1998, “UsingHTML and JavaScript in Introductory Programming Courses.”SIGCSE Bulletin 30(1): 176-180.

• Reed, David, 2001, “Rethinking CS0 with Javascript.” SIGCSE Bulletin 33(1): 100-104.

• Schneider, Gary, and James Perry, 2001, Electronic Commerce, SecondEdition. Course Technology.