Teaching with Technology

Citation

Balaban, M. E., Kirlidog, M., and Ayvaz-Reis, Z.  (2010).  Perceived importance and resource constraints of graduate information systems courses in Turkey.  International Journal of  Information and Communication Technology Education, 6 (1), 67-80.  doi: 10.4018/jicte.2010091106

Main Points

–    Education is an expensive process and the quality of an education program is largely affected by resources devoted to it.  
–    Availability of qualified instructors and physical amenities such as labs are the most important resources that determine the educational quality.  
–    Based on the graduate Information Systems curriculum recommendation of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for Information Systems (AIS) this article investigates the perceived importance of each course taught in graduate Information Systems (IS) programs in Turkey.  
–    The perceived importance is also compared with the availability of instructor and technological resources for each course for insight into educational resources and constraints.

Analysis

The article starts well describing the IS graduate programs in Turkey.  It details the limitations associated with this field to include of the 130 universities, 94 public and 36 private, only host 12 undergraduate and 13 graduate level IS programs; no standardization in languages, English, German, Turkish, and Turkish/English combination; varied entry requirements; and varied course titles.  The authors leave the background section to move into the theoretical section of the paper by making a declaration that quality of an education program is largely affected by resources devoted to it.  This section is devoted to comparing the good old days of resource-based learning to the more recent “bottom-line” approach, where the merits of an education system are evaluated according to the outputs or results.  In a resource constrained world, a balancing of both approaches must be made to continue to be successful.  The authors note that the accreditation process in India remains resource-based which says a lot to the commitment that the Indians have made to the IS field and may show their forward thinking to corner the expertise in the IS field.  The next section looks at the curriculums offered in the 13 graduate level IS programs and recommends a minimum 60-unit program.

The authors employed two methods for their research, 1) Content analysis of the IS graduate level courses and 2) they then performed a qualitative analysis of the answers gathered through a survey.  Their results boiled down to reaffirming that a program’s merits should be based on the learning that takes place and that the contents of teaching are determined by constraints of instructors, teaching material, and other physical amenities.  The best result was their uncovering the shortcomings between the perceived importance of a course and the resources available, instructors, software, and facilities.  I wouldn’t recommend this article.