Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Educational Features to aid tertiary education on the Internet. The administrative uses
showed slightly more benefits for the institution than for students and vice-versa for
educational uses. In both types of uses, their adoption seemed to be based upon how difficult
the feature was to set up as well as the added-value benefits it provided. An analysis of the
correlation of the benefits identified for institution and students showed a correspondence
between most of the uses, with a few interesting differences.
INTRODUCTION
For many years, information technology (IT) has been used to find ways to “add value”
for customers to entice them to purchase the products and services of a business. This
chapter examines the possibility of translating the benefits of “added value” to the use of the
Internet by tertiary educators for subject and course delivery. Many educators use the
Internet to supplement existing modes of delivery. Importantly, the Internet is providing a
number of “added value” supplemental benefits for subjects and courses delivered using this
new, hybrid teaching mode. There are two aspects to subject delivery to where “added-value”
benefits may be applied, and that is in the
administrative tasks
associated with a subject and
the
educational tasks
. In both instances, IT solutions can be employed to fully or partially
process some of these tasks. Given the complex and often fluid nature of the education
process, it is rare that a fully integrated solution can be found to adequately service both
aspects of subject delivery. Most solutions are partial in that key components are targeted
by IT solutions to assist the subject coordinator in the process. If we examine closely the
underlying benefits gained in the application of IT to these tasks, there is a strong parallel
to the benefits to be gained by business organizations with similar applications of IT. While
the actual benefits actually sought by academics depend on the motivation for the IT solution,
the perceived benefits can be classified using standard categories used to gauge similar
commercial applications.
BACKGROUND
In order to investigate the benefits of using Web-based techniques to supplement
traditional teaching in terms of business efficiencies, the reasons commercial organizations
use IT are examined. The different aspects of subject delivery also need to be considered in
order to draw a parallel with the ultimate benefits to be gained.
Information Technology: Efficiency and Added Value
There are a number of reasons for using IT in organizations today (O'Brien, 1999):
•
For the support of business operations
: This is usually to make the business operation
more efficient (by making it faster, cheaper, and more accurate).
•
For the support of managerial decision making
: Support is provided by allowing more
sophisticated cost-benefit analyses, providing decision support tools, and so forth.
•
For the support of strategic advantage
: This refers to the use of Porter's (1985) three
generic strategies as a means of using information technology to improve competitive-
ness by adding value to products and services.
