Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
organize piloting, etc.) and the project carried out. The projects carried out so far have
involved between two to five students as well as the instructor.
Analysis of the data has been primarily overseen by the instructor, as many Australian
information systems students have little previous statistical experience. All group members
receive a core set of results, plus they may undertake additional individual analysis. The issue
of lack of statistical background has been addressed somewhat in the later offerings of the
research methods course, with a formal introduction to SPSS and the use of statistics in
information systems research. This has led to an improvement in students' ability to actively
participate in this stage of the project.
The final stage of the project is the write-up. Students submit an individual report in the
format of a conference paper, and students are marked on them individually. At a later stage,
the instructor writes up a joint paper using the student papers as a starting point. Those
students who are still interested can also be involved in the final write-up and benefit from
seeing the importance of making iterative improvements to project write-ups.
The entire project must be carried out within one semester (about 15 weeks). In order
to encourage students to start the write-up early, a schedule, such as the example shown in
Table 2, is suggested to them. Those who make the suggested submissions receive detailed
feedback, which improves the quality of their final paper.
EXAMPLE PROJECTS
This section describes several successful projects as examples of the scale of project
that can be used. Most of the projects completed so far have been related to end user
computing. While students may not have formally studied end user computing in their
undergraduate studies, it is a concept with which they are familiar and which does not require
significant prior theoretical knowledge.
The first project was undertaken by the instructor and two Honors students. The
research question investigated was:
Do end users experience higher user satisfaction using applications that they have
developed themselves than do other end users using the same application?
The research question was addressed by designing an experiment where 40 business
student participants used their own and another spreadsheet application created as part of
a course they were taking. After using each spreadsheet, they completed a questionnaire that
measured end user computing satisfaction. During analysis, the project group compared the
satisfaction ratings of applications that were evaluated by their end user developers with
ratings of the same application by other end users
.
The results of the project were interesting, as end users were found to be significantly
more satisfied with applications they had developed themselves. The results of this project
were published in the
Proceedings of the 1998 IRMA Conference
(McGill et al., 1998). Both
of the students involved in the project felt that they had benefited from it, and while neither
continued to undertake a Ph.D., both published the research from their Honors theses in
international conferences.
A later project built upon the results of the initial project described above. This project
addressed the following research question:
