Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Pedagogical Context
The Dauphine-UQAM Executive MBA program was created in 1999 by the University
of Paris Dauphine and the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). It is offered in various
countries in Europe, including France, Lebanon, and Turkey, as well as in Canada. It is a part-
time MBA program that is taught three days per month (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) for
24 months. Thirty-eight students enrolled in the program in September 2001. In order to create
a competitive advantage over other executive MBA programs in Europe, the program
sponsors chose to rely extensively on information technologies in the program's courses.
An intranet system was established for the courses based on WebCT tools. Training on the
use of the different WebCT tools (on-line documents, newsgroup, chat, electronic black-
board) was provided to all professors and students participating in the program.
In one of the courses in the program, “Information and Information Technologies,” an
experiment was conducted using WebCT tools to facilitate on-line case discussion.
The population participating in the experiment were the students enrolled in the
Executive MBA in Fall 2001, consisting of 38 executives. A case was made available on the
program's intranet at the beginning of the “Information and Information Technologies”
course in September. The course, which ended in December, was divided into 10 classroom
sessions (two sessions per month). The case chosen illustrated the themes of the last two
sessions of the course in December. The case presents a traditional French company going
into e-business. Its conceptual themes are linked to e-business and include value migration,
business process reengineering, IT infrastructure, extranets, and IT project management. The
case examines the problem of going digital and using electronic relations to conduct business.
Most of the students did not have experience in on-line discussion before entering the
Executive MBA program. Therefore, we trained the students in on-line discussion before
starting the case discussion by conducting four on-line sessions on specific subjects related
to the course.
During the course, we scheduled different milestones related to the case in order to
enable all students to have time to read the case, prepare it, and participate in the discussions
on the intranet. As the case discussion would be difficult without questions to help students
prepare their contributions, we prepared four such questions. Then we divided the case
discussion into four sessions of 45 minutes each, with each session dedicated to one
question. For example, the first question of the case was to establish a strategic analysis of
the company based on a classical SWOT analysis.
DESIGN OF THE EXPERIMENT
To manage the case discussions, we used different electronic communication tools in
WebCT to build an on-line case discussion system. These tools and their use in the
experiment were as follows:
•
Calendar
: Each on-line session was scheduled using this tool. The tool generated an
electronic reminder to the students each time a new session was scheduled.
•
Chat
: This tool was used for on-line case discussion. For 4 weeks prior to the classroom
session on the case, we scheduled a 45 minute discussion on one question on
Wednesday at 9:00 PM. Each student was supposed to log in and participate in the
discussion. Because the students were executives, only about 20 students were on-
