A Case of Teaching and Assessing an Introduction to Information Technology Course

1. Introduction

With the fast development of technology, a business must adapt to technological advances to keep pace with the rapidly changing business environment. It’s not a surprise that the new Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB) standards emphasize technology agility, which includes:

Technology has become more important than ever before especially during the global health crisis where people are more confined physically and relying on the digital world more than anyone ever imagined. AACSB believes that business education plays an essential role in serving the greater good of the business world. AACSB’s 2020 business accreditation standards highlight the trend and need. Although 2020 AACSB standards don’t explicitly list the bullet points of the technology agility, the technological competency requirement is embedded in the context of the standards. For example, “The curriculum content cultivates agility with current and emerging technologies”, “Provide a narrative description of current and emerging technologies for which graduates would be able to demonstrate a reasonable level of competency employed at the degree level.” (AACSB 2020, Business Accreditation Standards, Standard 4 Curriculum)

While most business programs have the introduction to information technology course as a business core course, due to the limited credit hours, it’s always a challenge to teach introduction to information technology course in business programs (Austin et al., 2009; Harden et al., 2018; Modaresnezhad and Schell, 2019; Riordan et al., 2017). Some universities only cover information technology concepts, i.e., business-driven information systems, decision-making support, e-business, information ethics, information security, information technology infrastructure. Some universities only cover Microsoft Access and Excel. These two coverages can hardly meet the new AACSB technology agility requirement. To meet the AACSB’s technology agility requirement, business programs need to enhance and or revise the introduction to information technology course and may conduct a meaningful assessment on technology agility.

To our best knowledge, there are scarce references about how to effectively teach introduction to information technology courses in business programs to meet the new AACSB technology agility requirement and how to conduct an assessment on technology agility. This paper aims to report a new approach to teach the introduction to information technology course in a business program and the assessment plan for the technological competency learning goal.

The new teaching approach utilizes:

• 1)

  An adaptive approach to cover information technology/systems contents which usually contain information technology/systems value to the business, business intelligence, information ethics, information security, e-business, information technology infrastructures, e-business, and enterprise systems.

• 2)

  A simulation approach to cover Access and Excel.

• 3)

  Hand-on practice to enhance students’ ability to apply what they learn from simulation to solve business problems (projects).

The assessment plan includes the learning goal, learning objectives, and a detailed method of assessing the learning objectives, which may help other business programs if they need to develop a technology learning goal and then assess the goal.

The course covers three major components as per AACSB requirements and listed below;