1. 2nd course on “Advanced eBusiness” and collected “textbook” Z. Putnik & Z. Budimac

2. 2/22 Introduction Depending on the direction they are studying, students of DMI in Novi Sad, have ONE, TWO, or THREE elective seminars during their studies. Those elective seminars are situated in their II, III, and IV year of studies.

3. 3/22 Introduction Every year, lecturers from DMI offer topics to be covered through this course. So far, we had for example: –eLearning / Advanced eLearning –Mobile agents / Multi-agent systems –Prince and PMBOK in software project management –Selected topics in software/hardware development –Web mining –XML databases –.NET technologies –Combinatorial algorithms –Symbolic calculus …

4. 4/22 Introduction A need to cover a great number of students and offer them good seminars is obligatory: –II, III, and IV year has more than 200 students regularly enrolled + who-knows-how-many “old” students repeating their studies. –as mentioned, one direction has 2, and one direction even 3 elective seminars during their studies. –As a consequence, there are more than 300 students enrolled for some of the courses.

5. 5/22 Introduction Most of the mentioned courses, require some pre- knowledge: –“Prince and PMBOK” – requirement is exam in “Software Project Management” –“XML databases” – exam in “Databases” –“(Advanced) eLearning” – exam in “Software Engineering” –… II year students do not fulfill these requirements! There is no suitable course for them (that they like )!

6. 6/22 In addition As a part of TEMPUS project for Joint Master studies, a significant number of courses had to be developed. One of those was “Advanced e-Business”. Consortium of project members developed a guide what a course should cover, and enumerated general list of topics it should contain.

7. 7/22 In addition Course material was developed consisting of: –Presentations covering 7 topics, with around 400 slides –Set of group assignments for assessment by lecturer –Set of individual assignments: several for self-assessment several for assessment by lecturer –Text covering exam principles Missing? A book, obviously!

8. 8/22 Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness” Students of “Business informatics” direction have an obligatory exam at their I year of studies “Introduction to eBusiness”. Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness” was offered to students of the III and IV year of all directions, and for II year of “Business informatics” direction during 2007/08. Because of good experiences, we offered it again in 2008/09.

9. 9/22 Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness” Course was adjusted to abilities and limitations of graduate students: –One whole topic, and parts of other topics considered too advanced, were skipped. –Instead of using individual and team assignments, a list of topics covered during the lectures was offered, from which student has to select one, and write a seminar paper on the topic.

10. 10/22 Elective seminar “Advanced eBusiness” Course was adjusted to abilities and limitations of graduate students: –Certain technical rules about seminar papers were set (size, shape, rules and requirements...) –A set of around 40 ebooks / or around 300 MB of freely available material was given to students. –In addition, students were encouraged to do some autonomous and self-directed research of the Internet, on a given topic.

11. 11/22 Results During the first run in 2007/08, we had around 30 students enrolled – and excellent result for the first run of any elective course. Yet – “only” 19 finished they obligation within given time- frame, and produced a seminar paper covering one of the offered topics. There is a visible difference in quality, maturity and even literacy of material developed by students of the II year, and students of the IV year.

12. 12/22 Results Maybe, just maybe, course is too advanced for the students of the II year. What’s more problematic – not being able to create original material of satisfactory quality – students of II year more often than the other students – used copy+paste technique in their work.

13. 13/22 Results And what’s the most problematic thing – event though they had “Ethical aspects of informatics” as a course in their studies, a lot of them forgot it along the way! It happened on several occasions that they simply copied the whole passages, several pages long, from some doctoral/master thesis. NOT from a book … that would require translation! From some thesis published “in the neighborhood”, in CBS speaking countries

14. 14/22 Results Sadly – they didn’t have a feeling that what they done is wrong! “Yes – I copied it – why not? Was I not allowed?” Lucky for us – they do it so literally, that they get caught veeery easy! When a student of Hungarian nationality, somewhere in the middle of the paper, starts using “ijekavica”, (and stop using it 3 pages later), you get suspicious.

15. 15/22 “Textbook” Having 19 seminar papers for 20 topics – sometimes 2-3 papers for the same topic – was not good enough for a book, but it is a start! What’s more – another year came! During the year 2008/09, we had additional 42 students applying for the course.

16. 16/22 “Textbook” Situation with the finished papers is not great, but – together with students from last year who finished their papers, we currently have: –33 finished papers; –7 papers in 2 nd iteration –32 papers … somewhere

17. 17/22 “Textbook” What’s more – this situation gives us a chance to choose and pick the best of the seminar papers for each topic. Knowing that for each topic, we have at least 2, and up to 5-6 candidates, we estimate that final version of the “textbook” will be of a good quality.

18. 18/22 “Textbook” Currently, we have an ebook, entitled “Advanced eBusiness – Learning material for Elective Seminar”, editors and authors Zoran Budimac and Zoran Putnik. Enumerated authors are also 19 students, on 16 topics.

19. 19/22 “Textbook” The next “textbook”, that will be created sometime before the next summer semester, will hopefully cover ALL topics. Besides, hopefully again, we will have something to chose from, for EACH topic, thus creating us a better learning material.

20. 20/22 What next? For the next summer semester, we have to decide: –should we offer this elective seminar again? –should we, instead of seminar papers, start with originally suggested plan – individual assignments, team assignments, written or oral exam using the offered literature.

21. 21/22 What next? Even before that - for the next school year in general, we have to decide: –should we offer this course to the originally intended audience – master students? –if offered, what should we use as a method of examination.

22. 22/22 What next? Any suggestions?