Advanced e-Business Seminar: Course Overview and Student Results

1. Z. Putnik & Z. Budimac 2nd course on “Advanced eBusiness” and collected “textbook”

2. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. “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. “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. “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. “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. “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. 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. 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. What next? Any suggestions?