1. IS OPTIONAL PROBLEM-BASED SEMINAR ON THE WEB AN EFFECTIVE WAY OF LEARNING AS A PART OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT COURSE? Pekka Makkonen University of Jyväskylä FINLAND

2. 2 Course An undergraduate course for the first-year majors: Basics of information management and information systems development Themes (1) administrative view to information resources management, (2) technological view to information resources management, (3) building information systems, and (4) organizational applications

3. 3 Why problem-based seminar on the web? Combining learning based on both cognitive and social constructivism Students defined the problematic matters to learn by utilizing a lecture handout Students gathered information and presented that stuff in well-organized way Students familiarized themselves with presentations produced by other students In this way students taught each other in their “own language” concerning the difficult matters of the course

4. 4 How? Working in small groups (1 to 3 students) Composing coursework reports in which they reported What they learnt by searching for information on the web about the difficult matters of the course Web sites, which were useful We utilized the Optima e-learning platform and its shared workspace feature Presentations were put in the Optima workspace on the web Other groups commented on the outcomes

5. 5 Screenshot

6. 6 Our research goals How students’ knowledge was improved How the students experienced coursework in general Evaluating the effect of age The effect of group size How did we evaluate these goals? Pre- and post-questionnaires

7. 7 What we got Students’ knowledge improvement The statistical analysis did not show any significant differences between the groups The students who participated in our assignment learned the all themes of the course lightly better compared to the students who did not attend the coursework Attitude was mainly positive concerning the coursework and seminar generally (mean=3.79) The older students benefited more from this assignment than the younger students.

8. 8 Next step(s) The next step in our research is analyzing the motivation of students The motivation reflects the successfulness of the web- based coursework and this occurs especially from the perspective of the constructivist learning theory Improving this teaching setting