‘Hey professor, why are you teaching this class?’ Reflections on the relevance of IS research for undergraduate students

‘Hey professor, why are you teaching this class?’ An undergraduate student confronted me with this question on the first day of the information systems (IS) core course that I taught this past semester. In recent years, my work life has been devoted to administrative work as department chair, service to the academic community on editorial boards, research projects and publications, and doctoral seminars and graduate courses. These are the types of scholarly activities that build the IS field, and that IS faculty typically assume quite willingly. Undergraduate teaching has been on the metaphoric ‘back burner’ for me even as I fretted along with colleagues about the causes and consequences of low enrollments in undergraduate IS programs and the resulting decline in resources for IS faculty (cf. Panko, 2008; Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2009).

As department chair, I had assigned myself to teach this course, so surely I had a good reason for doing so! Yet, I was unable to produce a compelling answer. Had I simply reflected the student's question back to him (a useful rhetorical strategy when caught off guard) – ‘Hey student, why are you taking this class?’ – the answer would have been easy: ‘Because I have to, it's a requirement’. Explanations that entailed the pressures of university budget cuts, reduced enrollments in IS major courses, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business accreditation requirements, teaching load balance across the faculty, or other administrative trivia seemed uninspired and uninspiring. If I could not muster a stronger statement of why I chose to teach this undergraduate IS class, how could I expect students to muster enthusiasm for taking it?

The student's question surfaced my anxiety facing a room full of 20-year olds fulfilling a general curriculum requirement. The IS core course typically includes a survey of concepts, techniques and tools for IS in organizations, and it is notoriously hard to teach effectively. How could I be relevant enough to these students to keep them awake (quite literally) during class and spark their interest in the topic, perhaps even encourage a few to consider an IS major? These students have few memories of a world without the Internet, World Wide Web, cell phones and online video gaming. They quickly assimilated social networking software and smart phones and video streaming. The ubiquitous flow of information through multiple (and multimedia) channels is the air they breathe. Although they are more adroit users of such technologies than I am, most of these students understand little about how information technologies actually work, how challenging it is to design and effectively deploy technologies in organizations, or how work and social life, even industries, are being transformed with their rapid diffusion. Worse yet for the apprehensive instructor, most do not really care, as long as these technologies do work and are readily accessible to them. Yet, these are the types of topics IS faculty devote significant time and attention to in our research and that we set aside, perhaps reluctantly, when we teach undergraduate courses (Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2009).

At this point, the reader is likely to question what relevance my ruminations about teaching undergraduate students has in a research journal's opening editorial. As a discipline, we have engaged in numerous debates about the relevance of IS research to practitioners (cf. Keen, 1991; Robey & Markus, 1998; Benbasat & Zmud, 1999; Lyytinen, 1999; Baskerville & Myers, 2009). We have pondered the IS field's relevance to and position among other disciplines in the academic universe (cf. Baskerville & Myers, 2002; Benbasat & Zmud, 2003; Chiasson & Davidson, 2004). However, as an academic community, we have only, on rare occasions, considered explicitly the relevance of IS research to students (cf. Klein & Rowe, 2008; Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2009) and even more rarely, to undergraduate students.

Should we consider undergraduate students as constituents of IS research, in addition to but distinct from advanced students and practitioners? Would such an approach to teaching undergraduates improve our ability to reach, even inspire, these students? Is engaging undergraduates in IS research feasible in the university of the 21st century, especially students who are not ‘our’ IS majors?

My comments in this editorial reflect my experience as a research-oriented faculty member in a public U.S. business school; however, my ruminations about engaging undergraduates in research are not novel. The institutional and economic challenges to active engagement of undergraduate students in research are not limited to the IS field, to business schools or to U.S. universities (Clark, 1997; Robertson & Bond, 2005). Most universities are under pressure to ‘do more with less’, which often translates into processing more undergraduates more efficiently through the university system and into the employment market (Barnett, 1990). Commenting on this transformation of higher education, Clark (1997, p. 247) notes: ‘The two primary trends of enlarged access and [disciplinary] knowledge growth greatly increase the costs of higher education. Governments … make clear that they are not willing to pay throughout a national system for the increasingly high costs of research and research-based teaching and learning … Degree levels and types of degrees multiply; the teaching of first-year students and of doctoral and postdoctoral students becomes two contrasting ends of a lengthening sequence’.

Viewing undergraduate, as well as advanced degree students as constituents of IS research might help us to draw these ‘contrasting ends’ closer. The term constituent implies undergraduates would be included as essential, fundamental components in research endeavors, a status reserved for advanced masters and doctoral students (Klein & Rowe, 2008). Instead, undergraduates are viewed more typically as educational consumers or ‘clients’, a perspective Gill & Bhattacherjee (2009, p. 220) articulate: ‘Students are important clients for the MIS discipline because their tuition and fees directly contribute resources to the discipline. In return, we prepare them with the knowledge and expertise needed for gainful employment in the industry’. This functionalist perspective on higher education (Barnett, 1990) contrasts with historical views of the university as a community of scholars jointly producing new knowledge (Clark, 1997; Robertson & Bond, 2005). Knowledge becomes a type of ‘market good’ that is transmitted to (undergraduate) students rather than a social good involving shared insight and understanding, and teaching and research are increasingly differentiated by competing ideologies (Robertson & Bond, 2005, p. 511).

Of course, undergraduate students do have some acknowledged roles in IS research as subjects in and subjects of research. Undergraduates have been enrolled as participants in numerous experimental studies in which they are stand-in subjects for groups that we actually want to study – consumers, IT professionals, business managers and so on. Students have also been the objects of study in IS research on distance education and computer-mediated communication in educational settings. Some of these studies articulate general theoretic implications (cf. Leidner & Jarvenpaa, 1993; Santhanarn et al., 2008), while others are primarily pedagogic research contributions (cf. Kane & Fichman, 2009; Choudhury et al., 2010). Applied pedagogic research also includes the development of the Association of Information Systems (AIS) model curriculum (http://cis.bentley.edu/htopi/IS2010_11-23-2009.pdf), publication of teaching cases and educational evaluation research.

While valuable, such undergraduates roles in research fall short of realizing students’ potential as essential, fundamental components in IS research. Clark (1997, p. 251) articulates such an idealized vision of student engagement in research in the university setting:

Regardless of its specific nature, a research project involves a process of framing questions, using reliable methods to find answers, and then weighing the relevance of the answers and the significance of the questions. Student research activity is then, at root, a scholarly process for learning how to define problems and map a line of investigation. It is also a way to induce critical thinking and to develop inquiring minds, an active mode of learning in which the instructor provides an analytical framework and some particular ways of solving problems but does not offer answers to be written down, memorized, and given back. Even when resources and setting do not permit an actual plunging of pre-advanced students into projects, small or large, instructors who bring a research attitude into their teaching are likely to exhibit some features of the processes of inquiry.

In contrast with this labor-intensive (for both faculty and students) vision of student engagement in research, undergraduate education operates today under the dual pressures of mass production and cost efficiency (Barnett, 1990). In IS curriculum, research is pre-digested in textbooks and structured exercises for students’ consumption and recitation. Moreover, my last year's review of textbooks aimed at the IS survey core course suggested that we draw more heavily from the engaging reports of business journalists and pundits (for instance, Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century) rather than from IS research, which tends to focuses on narrowly defined theoretic issues of interest to other academics. The gap between IS research and undergraduate teaching is exacerbated as well, when undergraduate courses (such as the IS survey course) are delivered primarily by clinical faculty or doctoral students, freeing IS faculty to focus on advanced students and research (Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2009).

There are many circumstances that contribute to this approach to undergraduate IS education, including students themselves. Faced with rising tuition costs and educational debt and the need for part-time employment to help finance their education, undergraduate students view themselves increasingly as consumers in need of a ‘fast food diet’ of undergraduate courses, and expeditious movement through the costly university system. Many would balk at engaging in research projects, which might entail loosely defined assignments with uncertain outcomes. Similarly, IS faculty face increasing pressures to publish more and to publish in more prestigious journals, as their universities enter the ‘rankings arms race’. Many universities do offer some recognition and reward for teaching excellence, but such programs do not lead necessarily to greater integration of teaching and research. These programs may instead reinforce the dual tracks of teaching and research at the undergraduate level, as clinical and research faculties specialize in each track. Indeed, for research-oriented IS faculty, reduced teaching load is a highly desired means to the desired end (production of more research publications).

Without doubt, institutional and practical barriers are high to involving undergraduates in IS research. Interestingly, this type of pedagogical experimentation may have more appeal for faculty in institutions that do not have access to post-graduate and doctoral students (cf. Ward, 2005). Yet, if we could engage (at least some) undergraduate students more broadly with IS research, perhaps, we might transmit our own passion for our field to these students. Doing so might not only encourage more students to pursue IS-related studies, but might as well build ongoing engagement with IS as a field of study, as they graduate from the university to become professional workers – the very professionals we seek to be relevant to. That is, we might seed the field of future practitioners with those who would be interested in and engaged with IS researchers, by first engaging them in research as students.

As first steps, we might think more systematically about undergraduate students as constituents of IS research in their already-accepted roles. For example, when we utilize students in research studies, the researchers might engage the study subjects (as well as students in IS classes) in discussions of why and how the research was conducted, what difference it might make to the ways information technologies are designed, constructed or deployed, and what might be interesting and applicable to them from the study. In this way, we might move beyond basic debriefing to dialog with students about the intent, conduct and outcomes of IS research, to transform a mundane research procedure into a ‘teachable moment’. When we publish studies involving student subjects, we might include a section on ‘implications for students and teaching’ in addition to the obligatory ‘implications for practice’. Such reflections would help researchers to articulate the relevance of the research study to students, as well as inform colleagues about the possible useful insights.

There are encouraging developments in the IS field's approaches to pedagogic research in which students are the subject of IS research. Special interest groups focused on education (for example, the AIS Special Interest Group on Education; http://www.sig-ed.org/), journals and conference tracks that provide outlets for applied pedagogic research (for example, Journal of Informatics Education Research), and publication of materials such as teaching cases in IS research journals are all positive indicators that research about students may contribute to IS research relevance to students.

Moving beyond existing roles to engage undergraduate students as constituents in IS research endeavors will be challenging and risky for individual faculty members. There is an undeniable tension between the demands of teaching and research. Unless research-oriented faculty see possible benefits for their research, they are unlikely to alter pedagogic approaches in ways that might disrupt or increase their time commitment to teaching. At least initially, teaching evaluations may plummet and a faculty member's rate of research publications may slow, as students and faculty both struggle with new approaches, new relationships. With close supervision and careful planning, research that is co-produced with undergraduates could lead to traditional scholarly publications. However, large-scale efforts to involve undergraduates in research may not achieve the methodological rigor demanded of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, even if the research process is a valuable educational experience for students and produces potentially interesting results. Co-publication with undergraduate students may require alternative outlets, for example, open-source online sites that provide visibility for projects and to students’ work.

It will take leadership from senior members of the IS field – those best positioned to take career risks – to lead by example and to champion junior colleagues’ efforts in such ventures, particularly during tenure discussions. Following are some beginning ideas on how we might more systematically encourage experimentation with and legitimization of undergraduate involvement in IS research:

IS field-level actions:

• Increase attention to and debate about undergraduate student engagement in research through professional associations such as the AIS.

• Share successes and challenges, techniques and tools of student engagement in research through conference mini-tracks and panels, as well as web-based resources of professional associations such as the AIS.

• Observe and learn from other fields (e.g., natural sciences, computer science and engineering), which have more often embraced undergraduate participation in research (Ward, 2005).

University or college level actions:

• Work with student chapters of the AIS (http://sc.aisnet.org/sc/) to develop ideas for broader involvement of undergraduates in IS research projects within the local IS program.

• Increase participation in IS-related projects of students already interested in undergraduate research, for example, students in honors tracks or in the honors colleges (such as those programs established in public U.S. universities).

• Offer courses with smaller enrollments and narrower topic focus, which are most amenable for engaging students in research; the goals of such courses would be primarily knowledge discovery, not knowledge transfer or employment readiness.

Faculty member actions:

• Bring our own research observations and projects into the classroom to supplement ‘from the text’ teaching resources; articulating the value and insights of our research to these constituents (a very tough audience, I have found) may help us understand how to better articulate our field's value to colleagues in other fields and to practitioners.

• Use alternative genre such as narratives, case studies, teaching cases or even story-telling (Zald, 1996) for dissemination of some research; alternative genre would likely appeal to the imagination of undergraduate students more effectively than pro forma academic articles.

• Engage undergraduate students in local research projects (e.g., surveys of local businesses, observations of IT users; interviews with IT professionals) within established courses. Choose topics naturally of interest to undergraduates (Reichelt, 2008) such as their use of social networking sites or online gaming. Design science research projects may appeal to students as technology users or as potential designers (and particularly to IS major students) as well. Such projects might work well with entrepreneurship or e-commerce courses, for example.

Universities face many challenges with decreased public funding and increased demand to provide services to students. IS programs in many countries are facing growing institutional pressure due to competition for resources and low undergraduate enrollments, despite healthy IS job prospects for undergraduates (Panko, 2008). As a field, we continue to search for ways to increase undergraduate students’ interest in IS as a field of study. Should we consider taking on yet another mission as I suggest here – a reassessment of our scholarly engagement with undergraduates as research constituents? Doing so would require we ‘swim upstream’ against strong institutional currents, but it might as well help us to differentiate IS as a field of study within the business school. Through IS research we are trying to understand how information technologies are transforming our future worlds, and perhaps to influence transformations in socially desirable ways. If we invite undergraduates to join us in these intellectual journeys, students and faculty are likely to discover unexpectedly interesting places. And then we might have a good response when an undergraduate student asks us, ‘Hey professor, why are you teaching this course?’

In this issue of EJIS, we have seven excellent papers between the covers. The first two articles examine effects of computer-based communication on individuals. In ‘Exploring the Impact of Instant Messaging on Subjective Task Complexity and User Satisfaction’, Han Li and Ashish Gupta of Minnesota State University Moorhead, Xin Luo of The University of New Mexico, and Merrill Warkentin of Mississippi State University report on a fascinating experimental study that investigates the use of instant messaging in the workplace. Instant messaging has been increasingly embraced by business users, yet its impact on task complexity and user satisfaction remains relatively unknown. The authors identify two important factors (interruption frequency caused by instant messaging and position power of message sender) that may influence task complexity and user satisfaction. In addition, polychronic orientation (i.e., multitasking preference) is examined with respect to its moderating effect on task complexity and user satisfaction. The findings suggest that the effect of interruptions and position power on task complexity and user satisfaction is dependent on polychronic orientation. That is, workers with a polychronic orientation are more satisfied with the multitasking work process using instant messaging than the users with a monochronic orientation. Also, interruption frequency is found to have a negative effect on the process satisfaction of monochronic workers, but not on polychronic workers. This study provides new insights regarding how personal characteristics and social factors can jointly influence the subjective task complexity and user satisfaction with multitasking work processes such as those using instant messaging.

Can computer-based communication drive up conformity in groups? Evidence from Russell Haines and Joan Mann of Old Dominion University suggest that the answer is ‘yes’. ‘A New Perspective on De-Individuation via Computer-Mediated Communication’ provides a new insight regarding how the use of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) leads to de-individuation in groups. In this study, de-individuation is defined as a function of conformity, consensus, dispensability and participation. The authors propose that group influence on individuals is enhanced when opinions of group members are shared and a common identity is established through nominal labels via a CMC tool. At the heart of such group influence is the increased awareness of others’ opinions. The findings of a laboratory experiment show how an electronic voting decision is highly influenced by the presence of group opinion awareness, such that when group opinions are communicated, de-individuation becomes more pronounced compared with when group opinions are not communicated. (Sadly, after a long battle with cancer, Joan Mann passed away in December 2010.)

In this issue, we also have one article that focuses on the success of a particularly organized approach to manage IS. ‘Outcomes and Success Factors of Enterprise IT Architecture Management: Empirical Insight from the International Financial Services Industry’ by Christian Schmidt and Peter Buxmann of Darmstadt University of Technology presents a fascinating multi-staged and mixed method study that investigates the impact of a dedicated Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) approach on IT flexibility and IT efficiency. They conduct a series of interviews with EAM managers to investigate success factors that help achieve the objectives of EAM. The authors also develop a framework indicating how EAM is an enterprise-level function that governs a multi-polar enterprise IS process, and how it helps achieve IT alignment with global corporate objectives. Findings also indicate that EAM plays a significant role in the creation and sustainment of IT efficiency and IT flexibility. Supported through a field survey, the paper identifies several key factors that help achieve the goals of EAM.

Rounding out this issue, we have four articles that investigate different aspects of, and settings for, acceptance and assimilation of new technologies and IS. The first is ‘From Transactional User to VIP: How Organizational and Cognitive Factors Affect ERP Assimilation at Individual Level’, by Luning Liu and Yuqiang Feng of the Harbin Institute of Technology, Qing Hu of Iowa State University and Xiaojian Huang of Beijing Seeyon Software Co. This article presents a stimulating essay, which discusses the role that individual users play in ERP assimilation. The authors observe that the relation of individual-level assimilation with organizational-level assimilation remains unknown in the literature, and argue that individual-level assimilation can play a significant role in facilitating organizational-level assimilation. The findings from interviews with ERP users across five organizations confirm that individual-level assimilation indeed has impact on organizational-level assimilation. In addition, different categories of users (VIP users, power users and transaction users) were found to have different levels of assimilation. Further, there are four key drivers that facilitate individual-level assimilation, as well as two moderators that influence the relationships between the drivers and individual-level assimilation. This study underscores the role of individual users in improving ERP assimilation.

How much difference does it make if the users of a new technology are made patently aware of the innovations? In ‘A Framework for Stakeholder Oriented Mindfulness: Case of RFID Implementation at YCH Group, Singapore’, Thompson Teo of the National University of Singapore, Shirish Srivastava of HEC School of Management, C Ranganathan of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and James Loo of YCH Group investigate an implementation of RFID at a logistics provider. They use a lens of mindfulness that is grounded in innovation and stakeholder theory. Using a case-study approach, the authors propose a ‘stakeholder-oriented mindfulness framework’, which suggests that addressing the concerns of stakeholders helps make mindfulness more explicit in implementing an innovative technology. They also identify five underlying micro-processes and organizational routines that foster mindfulness. This study offers new insights about the relation of stakeholder theory with mindfulness including five organizational routines that facilitate mindfulness.

Thomas Stafford and Mark Gillenson of Fogelman College of Business and Economics, and Yang Yang of First Horizon Corporation raise our awareness that customer relationships (i.e., Customer Relationship Management Systems) are not the only relationships IS can manage. In ‘Satisfaction with Employee Relationship Management Systems: The Impact of Usefulness on Systems Quality Perceptions’, they investigate an emerging information system that assists managing business to employee relationships. Coined as employee relationship management (ERM) systems, this system supports activities pertaining to human resources and employee services, but its use and user satisfaction are not well understood in the literature. The authors study the factors that influence ERM user satisfaction based on a survey conducted with a total of 487 university employees, suggesting that employee satisfaction with ERM systems is determined by perceived systems quality. However, the authors note that perceived usefulness of ERM systems moderates the impact of perceived systems quality on satisfaction, such that when perceived usefulness of an ERM system is low, high perceived systems quality does not lead to high employee satisfaction.

We conclude the issue with ‘A Theory-Grounded Framework of Open Source Software Adoption in SMEs’, by Robert Macredie and Kabiru Mijinyawa of Brunel University. They explore factors influencing open source software adoption (OSS) in small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). OSS is considered a legitimate alternative to commercial software for SMEs that have financial and human capital constraints relative to large enterprises; however, there have been only limited studies of OSS adoption particularly in SMEs. Using multi-case study approach across 10 IT organizations, the authors identify eight factors that influence OSS adoption, and develop a framework based on the decomposed theory of planned behavior. This framework provides an excellent frame of reference for understanding and evaluating benefits and challenges in OSS adoption, and can also be used as a basis for making OSS adoption decision in SMEs.

We would like to extend our gratitude to the members of the EJIS editorial team, whose hard work has brought you this issue of EJIS: Scott McCoy, The College of William & Mary, Shridhar Nerur, University of Texas at Arlington, Eric Ngai, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Shan Pan, National University of Singapore, Andrew Sears, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Virpi Kristina Tuunainen, Aalto University School of Economics. Thanks also to Jong Seok Lee for compiling the article summaries for the editorial.