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March 14, 2006
MIS in Amsterdam
This week, TeachingMIS received an email from Jan van Wieringen, a fellow-MIS professor who teaches MIS in Amsterdam. Here is his email, with minor translation clarifications, in full:
"I teach MIS at HES Amsterdam, a university-like professional education Business School in Amsterdam, Netherlands."During the past 4-5 years I digitized my whole course, and I must say that it has become rather successful in the last 4 years. Results are better and better each semester and the efficiency is very high. Students love the subject now and are eager to get very high results."The whole course is intended for students of Commercial Economics (Marketing - our CE-department) and our International Department, hosting many students from the USA, the UK, France and China. Nowadays, nearly 90% like this subject very much."Though it is always a problem to give an exact definition of MIS, "my" MIS consists of
- Website building with Dreamweaver through on online coursebook
- SPSS, taught online with Viewlet Builder (works excellent)
- Making and evaluation of Online Surveys (website + SPSS) with createsurvey,com
- Ecommerce through on online course book with many links
- Principles of MS Visio
- SQL with MySQL
"I use many IT-techniques to make the whole program interesting and nice to learn."Principles of my approach are:
- Divide all learning material into small bites, that can just be learned in one or two days
- Organize small exams about each week, which keep the students working; this is done with MC-questions in WebCT
- No repeats for any test: just do it and learn only once!
- If small projects are insufficient, the students have one week to to improve it. I don't accept insufficient work
- All results are immediately available on line
"In Dutch schools there is a tendency to work not harder than required to pass a year. So 55% is sufficient, but I now see students going for 90%-100%, which is quite unique. This is the only subject they want to work for. If you would print the coursebook Ecommerce, you'll get some 150 pages. No one ever had a comment on that. My subject requires learning every week!My whole program, also partly written in English, is available at www.hesit.com"Just watch and ask any question you want!""
Wonderful to have input from a European colleage. Thanks to Professor Wieringen for sending it!
Posted by DavidK at March 14, 2006 07:58 PM | Permalink