Contingent Approach: My teaching varies according to the goals of the course and the degree program to which it belongs and according to the background, capabilities, and aspirations of the students. In general, I strive to cover as much in a course as circumstances allow. I generally lecture during much of my class time but vary this by including computer demonstrations, case discussions, discussions of topical events from the business press, and so on.
I have tailored my teaching approach to my students. When I was at the University of Cincinnati, the undergraduates in our IS program were highly motivated, hard-working students. I did not need to spend any classtime explaining the importance of a topic or otherwise motivating them to work on the subject matter. Now that I am at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, we have no undergraduate IS program. However, students in the general BBA degree program have to be told how a given topic will tie into other functional areas or otherwise be useful before most of them will be motivated to spend much time mastering it.
Although my primary teaching method is the lecture, the methods that supplement lectures vary according to the content of the course. Also, the choice of methods is influenced by the scheduling of the course, the type of students, and even the nature of the classroom. My lectures tie into the readings, but they do not fully duplicate out-of-class readings. Most of my lectures have four purposes: I emphasize the main points of the reading, I provide context and frame the material, I present minor points that the reading omits, and I address any mistakes.
As a specific example of how the situation impacts my choice of teaching methods, BIS 558 "Management and Economics of Computers" is always scheduled for a 2.5 hour time period one evening per week. In that course, I make sure that I do not do the same thing for the entire 150 minutes. BIS 558 is taught by lectures and case discussion. Generally, lecture material from one week is relevant to analyzing the case in a subsequent week. The typical class schedule involves 60 to 90 minutes of lecture followed by 90 to 60 minutes of case discussion. Most of the students work with information technology during the day, but few of the students have risen high enough in their organizations to have had much experience with the issues we cover in this class, so I can safely treat them all as novices with great interest in the material.
Impact of Research: My research affects my classroom teaching. I have a series of papers with Art Gilbert and Sidne Ward on IS issues. In these papers, we examine how CEOs and CIOs think about major information systems issues at their firms. We tie their ratings of importance of these issues with characteristics of their firms and characteristics of themselves. I use some of these papers in teaching my course BIS 558 "Management and Economics of Computers." In the very first lectures in the course, I have my students read one of the papers in this series, and I use the results reported in the paper to introduce the topics that will be covered for the remainder of the semester.
This is not the only case where my research adds to my teaching. Without burdening my students with very specialized results, I use the introduction and literature reviews from several other of my papers as readings in BIS 558. Obviously, becoming familiar with the literature and writing the paper serves both as a contribution to the literature and a thorough preparation for lectures. These include a paper on Enterprise Resource Planning software (as yet unpublished) and a paper on centralization and decentralization published in Journal of Systems Management. I also present results from several papers I have coauthored with James Jiang and others on project team success and failure along with results from other papers in a lecture on project risks. The literature reviews for my papers in knowledge management assist me in preparing a lecture on that topic in BIS 552 "Database Management."
Use of Technology: I use technology in my teaching as appropriate. PowerPoint allows me to speed through material. Sometimes, it is better to cover a difficult topic (such as normalization theory in a data management class) by writing examples and theorems by hand on the chalk board. This gives students time to think about the material as it is being presented. I use the web to enhance the classroom experience. The web allows me to post changes to the syllabus and to link to supplemental materials. I can also link to handouts and assignments for the convenience of students who missed class.
Evaluation of Students: I believe grades serve two purposes. One is to provide evaluation and feedback. The other is to motivate students. As with every other aspect of my teaching methods, my goal is to help students to learn.
Evaluations of students should come from a variety of sources. In that way, an unfairness in one source may be cancelled out by another source. Although I will not use all of these in a single course, I like to use written assignments, individual computer assignments, class participation, group projects, term papers, and examinations in some combination to evaluate students. I have experimented with using a mix of individual work and team work. I have learned that if even a few of the students in a class are part-time commuters, then it is necessary to provide class time for them to work together on group projects. I try to prevent free riders on teams by having team members evaluate each other and by reviewing team work using individual exams. I prevent free riders on class discussions by noting immediately after each class the extent and quality of each student's participation. Retrospective notes are not perfect, but I think that over the course of an entire semester, errors will tend to even out.
Although much motivation comes from within, I use the grading policy of a course to provide appropriate external motivation. The grading policy spurs behavior that helps students learn. In every course, at least part of the grading comes from in-class exams. I write my exams so that most students who have been paying attention should be able to get 50% of the questions in a straightforward way. The remaining 50% of the questions will require them to think about the principles and techniques of the course in a new way and apply those principles in a novel way to an unusual situation. If they can do that in the time pressure of the exam situation, I am confident that they will be able to handle the more complex situations encountered in the world of commerce.
Specific motivators:
A. In my case course (BIS 558), I reward students for being prepared and for participating in the discussion. If they are not prepared, they will not get much out of the discussion, and they end up doing poorly on exams. When I did not grade class participation, my students did not do well on my exams. Grading class participation has raised exam performance, and I think the students will be better prepared to apply the principles outside of class as well.
B. In my database course (BIS 552), I generally use old exam problems as a basis for homework problems. Students who do the homework tend to do well in the course. I have found that students do much better on exams during semesters when homework is collected and graded.