Search

First year students face a daunting range of challenges as they make the transition to university life. Their experiences in the first months of university have a defining influence on their success or otherwise in their studies. The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of a case study that tests the efficacy of a student engagement and retention strategy aimed at first year students. The strategy encourages self-reflection and goal-setting by encouraging them to think constructively about their ideal future career. Once created, this idea is reinforced to become a firm goal. The student's perception of university study is thus reframed from being an end in itself to being a means to an end. Instead of perceiving the future as endless assignments and exams, they see themselves moving purposefully towards their ideal career. This paper, therefore, describes a three-stage case study that explores the effectiveness of this engagement strategy with a cohort of 258 demographically-diverse first-year ICT students en-rolled in a Bachelor of IT program. In the first stage of the strategy, the lecturer spends 20 minutes of the first four lectures presenting material across a range of cutting-edge technology topics. In addition to this, the characteristics of high-performing IT professionals are elucidated. The objective of this stage is to paint a picture of a creative, high-performing practitioner who is producing cutting-edge work. In the second stage, an assessment item is set in which the students explore their ideal career using a Web 2.0 digital curation tool; in the third stage, a series of three questionnaires are administered, the results of which are analysed to determine the students' attitude towards the engagement strategy. In the final analysis, 63.4% of students surveyed indicated that the exercise had helped them to become more committed to finishing their degree program. It is suggested that this strategy could be generalised to work with other disciplines besides information technology. The results are sufficiently encouraging for a formal follow-up study to be per-formed in two and a half years, when this cohort are nearing the end of their degree program, to determine what longer term effect the engagement and retention strategy might have had on the students' commitment to their study.

An important aspect of education is to promote higher-order thinking skills to learners. However, in the lecture environment, learners are passively engaged and it is unlikely for higher-order thinking to occur. Although interventions such as "clickers" can be used to increase engagement in lectures, this does not necessarily promote higher-order thinking. Approaches such as collaborative learning are better suited for this but there is little room to use such methods in the short time frame of a lecture. With recent advances in the capabilities of smart mobile devices and their growing penetration rate among the student cohort, it is possible to take advantage of these devices to design a system to promote higher-order thinking skills in the lecture environment. We present the design of a mobile-app-based collaborative learning system named "myVote" and a process for its usage. Our aim is to present a theoretical paper that discusses the relevant learning theories used in designing the system as well as describe a process to use the system to achieve collaborative learning at varying levels of thinking. We demonstrate the usefulness and flexibility of the system through three scenarios involving different levels of thinking, ranging from lower- to higher-order. Although the scenarios are in the context of IT education, the system is versatile enough to be adapted for education in general and also non-educational settings, such as business-like environments. Our contribution is a framework for using mobile apps and collaborative learning theories within a lecture environment to encourage higher-order thinking in learners. Although a potential limitation of the system is that it may not be appropriate for teaching more technical IT materials, such as programming and SQL code snippets, the problem can be recasted in a different format such as pseudocode in order to facilitate teaching in these areas. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

Recent surveys of information technology management professionals show that understanding business domains in terms of business productivity and cost reduction potential, knowledge of different vertical industry segments and their information requirements, understanding of business processes and client-facing skills are more critical for Information Systems personnel than ever before. In an attempt to restructure the information systems curriculum accordingly, our view is that information systems students need to develop an appreciation for organizational work systems in order to understand the operation and significance of information systems within such work systems. Work systems are systems in which human participants and/or machines perform work to produce products and/or services for internal or external customers. This view stresses that systems in organizations involve more than an IT system (such as a data warehouse or an accounting application). The work system method has been designed to assist in developing an understanding of work systems in organizations. The method describes an adaptable set of steps that an analyst can use to identify a work system, clarify problems, issues, and opportunities related to that work system, identify possible directions for change, and produce and justify a recommendation. To date, the use of the work system method in information systems curricula has demonstrated that postgraduate students can benefit from this approach when examining a business situation involving an information system. To contrast the experiences of post-graduate students with work experiences, in this paper we report on use of a simplified version of the Work System Method in a freshman Information Systems course and study how students without work or technical knowledge performed when analyzing IT-reliant work systems in business settings. We reflect on an introductory information systems course that included a work system analysis assignment, and we examine the reports produced by students as well as the learning outcomes and challenges. Our analysis reveals that undergraduates can benefit from analyzing IT-reliant work systems through the work system method. Their analyses tend to reflect their lack of business background, but doing these analyses can help as a first step toward appreciating the business situations in which information systems are used. We present a series of implications for improving the class experience related to teaching work system ideas and including IT-reliant work systems as an essential part of an introductory information systems course. These implications relate to clarifying the scope of a work system analysis, providing examples of successful as well as unsuccessful analyses for guidance, providing relevant analysis templates, succinctly defining terminology and assisting in emphasizing the differences between technologies, work systems, and organizations. Perusing these recommendations, our work demonstrates how information systems students can start developing a holistic understanding of information technology in use in corporate organizations at a very early stage of their learning process. (Contains 1 figure and 7 tables.)