Teaching Electronic Commerce: Problem-based Learning in a Virtual Economy
Howard Rosenbaum
During the spring 2000 semester, students in a graduate course in electronic commerce (e-commerce) at the School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, US, built and operated information businesses in a web-based "virtual economy," (VE) a simulation of a competitive electronic marketplace for information products and services. They competed for the digital dollars of shoppers, who were students at the Napier University Business School in Scotland. This paper describes the redesign of the course from a traditional lecture based class to one centered around a dynamic and situated learning enviromnent in which students are confronted with a "real-life" problem - how to start upand operate aninformation "e-businesscs" ina competitive market economy. After a discussion of vproblem-based learning," the approach used as the basis for the redesign, there is a description of the VE and the student-builder and student-shopper experiences in the VE. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the problem-centered approach to teaching e-commerce usinga simulated economyand suggestions for the next iteration.
Howard Rosenbaum joined the faculty of the School of Library and Information Science in 1993. He has an interest in social informatics and researches the history and development of the Internet and its implications for the information professions. electronic commerce, community networking, and managers and their uses of information in organizations. Recently, Dr. Rosenbaum has completed a study of web site administrators, search engine robots, and information access and is working on a study of web-based customer service for e-commerce, He is completing a book Information Technologies inHuman Contexts: Learningfrom Organizational and Social Informatics with Rob Kling and others. Dr. Rosenbaum has also has led seminars on electronic commerce at Napier University Business School in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has presented his work at the Association for Information Systems' annual meetings, the American Society;forInformation Science'sannual meetings, the International Communications Association, the Canadian Association for Information Science, and the American Sociological Association. Dr. Rosenbaum has had extensive experience usingqualitative methods in a variety of settings to investigate a range of research problems in library and information science. He teaches classes on electronic commerce, information architecture for theweb, intellectual freedom, and information organizations, and offerscontinuing education workshops for information professionals in XML, CSS, and web page design.
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