1. Benefit of WWW-based seminar 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: Information management and information systems development Themes (1) managing information resources, (2) building information systems, and (3) organizational applications

3. 3 Why web-based seminar? increased amount of information systems education as well as students at universities-> impossibility to organize conventional seminars Need for more flexibility because of heterogeneity of the students Adult education technical infrastructure has been improved (for example high-speed broadband connections to the student village)

4. 4 How? Web CT and its presentations feature Working in small groups (3 to 5 students) with feasibility study which dealt with one typical information system (stock control, sales order processing, etc.) Presentations were put in each group’s separate workspace on the web Other groups commented on the outcomes Control groups to compare the value (not in this paper)

5. 5 Was web-based seminar successful? First evaluations Questionnaires (at the beginning and the end) The process of the coursework and seminar Course work generally Motivation Authoring Reading outcomes of other groups and participating in seminar How the students of the experimental group experienced the Web CT tool Comparing main phases of web-based coursework Evaluating effect of age, gender, size of group and faculty

6. 6 What we got Web-based seminar worked well coursework generally authoring seminar (reading others’ work and commenting on them) Web-based seminar is suitable for older students The students who studied IT and IS as minor benefited more from web-based seminar

7. 7 Personal thoughts Prefer HTML format Avoid use of subfolders Think about differences of browsers As a teacher do not use all the features of a learning environment: think about your pedagogical design first. For example, the Web CT includes a lot of features: only some of them may be suitable for one course. This means that as a teacher you should choose the features used from the perspective of your own pedagogical view. Blended learning

8. 8 Research continues Comparing experimental group to control group We ran another course on the same topic without a web-based seminar These results will be published