Where am I coming from?
>>A book holds a house of gold<< (Chinese proverb) but the value of that gold is enhanced by the jeweler. My approach to teaching models this proverb. There is a wealth of information in books and the classroom experience could be justifiably limited to learning these facts and formulas. I try to bring into the classroom the reality of the workplace so the student can turn gold into something more precious -- an understanding of how these facts can influence their performance in a forthcoming career.
What I hope to accomplish
While my courses are a blend of technical and managerial topics, I encourage students to gain competency in public speaking and workplace discussions. I try to find ways to make their education real and relevant to lessen the shock of their first workplace assignment. Most students have come through an educational system that rewards knowing these facts rather than applying what they know.
In my experience as a teacher in the Middle East, I have come to realize that my role is less to make sure the facts and formulas are learned, but to guide students to apply what they are learning. Wherever possible, these tasks are done within a project setting but in the relative safety of a classroom environment where mistakes are opportunities to learn.
BSc Engineering Economics, Database & Information Engineering, Human Factors, Simulation.
BBA Management Information Systems, Knowledge Management, Business Database Systems, Management of Search Marketing Technologies, Social Media in Digital Business
MBA Enterprise and Systems Integration, Challenges of Project Management, Process Improvement (co-teaching at School of Nursing), Data & Information Management, Introduction to Management Information Systems, Social Media Management Strategy
EMBA Knowledge Management
Business Information and Decision Systems (BIDS) Track
Lebanese companies haven't caught on to the business analyst concept or the traditional information systems career paths. Enrollments have been low in our track partly due to a mystique of being difficult or technical.
The Olayan School of Business since its inception in 2001 has used tracks (rather than departments) to promote inter-disciplinary activity. However the tracks still represent silos that result in sub-optimal usage of resources. For example, Accounting Information Systems taught in accounting and e-Marketing (almost like our e-commerce course) is taught in Marketing. BBA students are currently required (prior to 2008) to take four of their five business elective courses within their own discipline. This limits taking courses based on student interest. As of 2008-9 students only have three electives.
Over the past two years I pushed for the following initiatives:
a) cross-listing courses that overlap tracks giving students greater access to courses and increasing flexibility of faculty assignments.
b) introduce career-related course clusters within our own track. Students didn't know what BIDS meant (until too late) and unaware of the job possibilities. My study of student behavior in choosing an emphasis suggests that one-third are driven by job prospects. We as a track needed to include in the catalog what are the job opportunities. These are currently Supply Chain/Logistics (Beirut Port is beyond capacity as all the major shipping companies recently selected Beirut as the trans-shipment point for the Mediterranean), IT Audit, and Market Analytics.
c) bring up the discussion of inter-track clusters. IT Audit and Market Analytics would best serve students in these multi-discipline fields.
Customer Service Technologies - Lebanon has a wealth of multi-lingual talent educated in a Western setting. Professional wages are low (minimum wage is US$300 per month). With political stability and improved internet bandwidth, staffing call and support centers with university graduates is the next step in developing Lebanese resources.
Managing Knowledge in the Age of Social Networking (updating INFO 230 Knowledge Management) - With the widespread adoption of social networking technologies, the traditional view of collecting knowledge in corporate repositories is dated (and never really worked). The course is intended to be fun for students (getting credit to use Facebook - how cool) while exposing them to the state of the art and emerging management issues in using these technologies.
Social Media Analytics - Social media channels generate a variety of data that are often related. There are a number of tools, both paid and free, that analyze this stream of data. I am co-teaching the analytics portion of our Social Media Management and Digital Branding courses.
The classroom approach differs slightly between the core undergraduate classes and my undergraduate and graduate electives.
I was course coordinator for the core undergraduate information systems class so I had time to push through a more systematized means of assessment that also reached a higher Bloom cognitive level and explicitly recognizing concept transformations. The heart of our midterm and final exams is a pre-exam case the students receive 4-5 days in advance. It is in their best interest to review all the exercises done in class and apply them to the case. They receive the case along with additional information so they can answer the case questions on our Moodle case-based exam. The idea got started because moving to an online exam meant the students had no paper to write notes to themselves (and hopefully not others). Well if you have to give them paper you might as well make it useful!
For the core undergraduate information systems class, my goal is to give them an appreciation for information systems even though most students have a finance or marketing emphasis. I have them interact with examples of the technologies being described in the textbook. Most students have limited exposure to information system applications used in business partly because of the limited internet penetration in Lebanon (e.g., DSL just initiated this summer). For example during the decision tools chapter, I show them the Vanguard mutual fund selection tool that combines an expert system with a decision support system. I also have them price out the same computer configuration on various Dell e-commerce sites (e.g., Home versus Small Business) to explain integration of information systems and the use of technology for marketing and revenue enhancement. They are amazed that the identical configuration has a different price depending on the market segment. During the application development chapter I have the students step through the life cycle as they build a decision support tool to determine how well they must do on the final exam to get the course grade they desire. This also gives me a sense of their spreadsheet skills which I feed into my recommendations for the revamping of our computer literacy course.
Here are activities that I am using for the core MIS course.
Google Finance Stock Portfolio
Starting in Fall 2009, I am requiring students to build a simple stock portfolio. Feel free to visit the course website and look at instructions I've posted for build a portfolio exercise.
Objective: Show utility of information systems to predominantly (~40%) finance students.
I'm not aware of any MIS textbooks that directly address finance let alone examples and cases. My finance students tune out with ERP, CRM, inventory, supply chain, and business intelligence which to varying degrees can be illustrated.
Challenges: The stock portfolio of Google Finance (at this writing) doesn't automatically input the price of the transaction. While inputting the price is a key part of the demonstration during class, most students don't get this part (no finance class yet or probably not paying attention). They don't seem to be familiar with cost basis when they have to generate it themselves (by looking up historical price).
Build Your Own Website and Use Google Analytics
Starting in Fall 2009, I am requiring students to build a simple website (e.g., Google Sites). Feel free to visit the course website and look at instructions I've posted for build a website exercise. Examples of their work are on the page Previous Work.
Objective: Most of our business students are afraid of technology (though they can use smartphones and Facebook without a problem). The primary goal is to expose them to the ease of building a simple website and tracking visits using Google Analytics. Many of our students will be joining small family businesses where professional web development many not be an option for them. I also want them to be creative and visualize what a website should look like.
Challenges: The web development interface of Google Sites is straightforward. Most of the problems are structuring their webpages as site layout is hidden and will spend more time demonstrating it. Many had problems getting the UA tag for Google Analytics into Google Sites. Given that most students don't pay attention in class and don't read instructions I'm not so concerned about it. The real challenge students reported in their end-of-assignment reflection was the difficulty in coming up with an idea for a website. Some abandoned their original ideas.
I use "participations" (non-graded get points if you do it) to push them to do the basics of setting up a website so they won't have so much trouble in the days before the assignment is due. Perhaps I need to be more strict about these early creation steps so that they can focus on building content.
Shopping and Web 2.0
For Spring 2010, I assign students to buy something via an e-commerce site as most have not purchased anything from a website. I use this assignment for them to identify Web 2.0 features found on most websites today. Feel free to visit the course website and look at instructions I've posted for Shopping Web 2.0 exercise
Objective: Going through a B2C transaction is important for students who have never done so (note that I teach in a developing country). Being able to relate the various technologies employed by e-commerce businesses to the features on the website - especially Web 2.0 is an insightful experience.
Challenges: A good e-commerce website mashes up all the technologies so not readily apparent what is Web 2.0, CRM, or business analytics.
Blog
Starting Fall 2010, I assigned a blog creation and analysis task using Google Analytics and Feedburner.
Objective: Minimize technology learning - allow students to focus on creating blog posts and seeing what kind of traffic those posts generate. By seeing how their friends or the broader internet community reacts, they might get interested in information systems as a course emphasis.
Challenges: The learning of technology is minimized though some students still don't follow instructions and take a 15 minute setup into hours long ordeal (trying to guess where they went wrong). See the task for details.
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
I have used this Gulf Job Comparison exercise since Spring 2008. Details are on the SDLC page on this website.
Objective: I started the exercise to illustrate decision support systems because students were enamored with the high salaries in the Gulf. They didn't know how to make a cost of living comparison which is really an income/expense balance sheet. I also wanted to assess their spreadsheet skills to see if there were improvements semester to semester (there has been). I've now realized the exercise is more valuable to illustrate one software development approach. Most of these students will be managers so coming up with requirements and conveying them to software developers are critical skills.
Challenge: Students might be able to read a balance sheet from the textbook but are clueless in actually making one for themselves on a spreadsheet. It is painful to struggle with basic spreadsheet skills (e.g., sum cells). The design of a spreadsheet layout is a critical skill and not being taught.
In all the elective courses I teach for BBA or MBA, my strategy is to emphasize that what is being taught has a future impact. I have my students work on real projects (i.e., capstone action projects) whenever possible. While this increases the variance of the pedagogical path, I found the unexpected opportunities for learning outside the stated objectives is particularly rewarding for the students. These tangential learning nuggets are often in the social realm that meets the technical world. For example, the knowledge management class was enlisted as a project team to build a new faculty knowledgebase and only collectively could they finish the project. The end product was the static content and structure of this website. Along the way, students had to interview new faculty to see what information would have been available, find the sources for such information including more interviews, synthesizing the information, along with managing the coordination between the content teams. A student in this knowledge management class related how an interview went exceedingly well because he had to reflect in the classroom on how his skills could be leveraged to move the entire project forward. Another student (see section 5) wrote a note to express how the course reflected his work in a financial consultancy.
Link to AUB New Faculty Knowledgebase
Students from the Spring 2006 semester Knowledge Management Class elicited, captured, and designed the website for the New Faculty website.
While these projects that aim at student learning don't directly contribute to publishable research articles in the top six information systems journals, I am investing in a network of relationships that also gives me an understanding of hospital activities that over time can have a payoff. I try to build on earlier projects so that the cumulative work may have a publishable element. For example, I supervise nursing graduate students interested in informatics. The first student was tasked with identifying potential computerization opportunities and concluded a hand-held nursing assessment tool would be beneficial. The next student identified the usage requirements for such a tool. The storyboard for the patient medication list (for a PDA) is shown to the right. Two business undergraduates came up with the user interface elements based on the nursing input. The hope is that a third nursing student can work with application developers to build a prototype.
I share my network of contacts with others. For example, I provided my junior colleague, who teaches the database course, with a hospital project of sufficiently narrow scope that her students could complete. My reward comes from hearing these students speak excitedly about what they have accomplished.
I am one of two instructors piloting Team-Based Learning at OSB in Spring 2010. Not only trying out TBL but in a multi-section setting. My role is implementation - processes and adaptation for Moodle.
Cultural Adaptations - We teach in a multi-section setting (standardization across all sections in a course) and a culture of "obligatory sharing of information" (aka cheating in Western parlance). My colleague has devised some strategies to account for some of these cultural issues and I'm adapting them.
Moodle Adaptation of TBL - Our institution can't afford the scratch sheets and we teach in computer labs anyway so adapting the logistics of the Readiness Assurance Process (RAP) to Moodle. So we have two Moodle quiz activities: iRAP and gRAP.
I introduced a mini-case exam to our MIS course in Fall 2010. Students receive a two page case that embodies the concepts taught in the course. The case is based on a real company but the situations are modified to fit the course content. The case is distributed 4-5 days in advance so the students can understand its nuances (and if smart - analyze). The exam questions are based on the pre-exam case plus additional information.
I was primary author for the following:
Wadi Rum Outdoors (INFO 200) – Fall 2011
Roadsters Diner Online Ordering (INFO 200) – Spring 2012
Hotel Online Reviews (INFO-MKTG 250D) – Fall 2011
Fashion Designer Social Media Presence (INFO-MKTG 250D) – Spring 2012
Hotel Online Reviews Revisited (MKTG 350B) – Spring 2012
I am the mentor/coach for IT-related case competitions and evangelist for competitions in general at OSB. Here is my case competition resource page.
The international competitions attended to date: CaseIT 2010, Marshall 2011, CaseIT 2012.
Our first internal case competition in collaboration with Deloitte was held in May 2012.
New Faculty Website Content
Storyboard (PDA size)