No abstract

A capstone course is normally offered at the end of a program of study with the goal of helping students synthesize what they have learned in the courses preceding it. The paper describes such a course-an undergraduate capstone course for MIS majors-that was built around case discussions and projects and originally offered in a face-to-face format. Over the course of the study, an asynchronous online version of the course was developed that was intended to be as faithful as possible to the classroom version. The paper examines the design, delivery, and learning outcomes of the online offering, contrasting it with the classroom version.The transition to an online course required many adaptations. Among the issues that we needed address are the following: 1) moving the highly synchronous face-to-face discussions of each case study to an asynchronous format without losing fidelity and energy, 2) changing how "student participation" was defined and evaluated, 3) adapting the project component of the coursewhich ended with a very popular "science fair" activity at the end of the semester in the classroom version-to a delivery mechanism where students never interacted with each other face-toface, and 4) evaluating the relative learning outcomes of the two approaches.The results of the conversion proved to be consistent with some of our expectations and surprising in other ways. Consistent with expectations, the online tools that we employed allowed us to create an online design that was relatively faithful to the original version in terms of meeting learning objectives. Also consistent with our expectations, student perceptions of the coursewhile quite positive overall-were more mixed for the online course than for its face-to-face predecessor. The course offering produced two surprises, however. First, the online approach to the project component of the course actually seemed to result in higher quality project presentations than the face-to-face version. Second, when results were compared from the instrument we used to evaluate student learning gains, the classroom and online versions of the class proved to be nearly indistinguishable. Given the very different delivery mechanisms employed, we had anticipated far more differences in student perceptions of what they had learned over the course of the semester. Given the challenges of taking a highly interactive class online, we viewed this surprise to be a very pleasant one.

As the complexity of a system grows, the challenge of informing the stakeholders of that system grows correspondingly. Nowhere is that challenge more daunting than in business education, where globalization, technological innovation, and increasingly complicated regulations continuously transform the business environment facing graduates and practitioners. Informing science theory proposes that different levels of complexity require different channels if effective informing is to be achieved. The paper first examines how two important sources of complexity-the diversity of clients and the ruggedness of the business landscape-are changing, and how these changes demand vastly more interactive informing channels if impact is to be achieved. Using an exploratory case study methodology, it then takes a detailed look at how one institution-the University of South Florida's Muma College of Business-has introduced a variety of new channels, many of which enable informing flows without necessarily directing them, to adapt to these environmental changes. It then considers both outcomes related to these individual informing channels and college-wide outcomes related to a broad and deep mosaic of informing flows. Finally, it considers the question of the resources required to support these new channels and the relationship between resource acquisition and channel introduction. The proposed framework for looking at business school informing channels can be applied by administrators, faculty members, and key stakeholders in understanding, evaluating, and planning programs and activities supporting informing in a complex environment. Ultimately, the informing business school framework may also provide a means for communicating impact to business school accrediting agencies (such as AACSB).

No abstract