GooLearning In a Management Information System Course

Transcription

1 GooLearning In a Management Information System Course Prof.Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman Chairman of the Board and CEO College of Internet Distance Education Assumption University of Thailand charm@ksc.au.edu Abstract- At the age of 72 in the year 2009, Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman has been teaching the course Management Information Systems (MIS) for more than 45 years. He taught the MIS course in the classroom mode at McMaster University in Canada in the year , at the University of Alberta in , at the University of Missouri in , at the State University of New York in Brockport in , at the National Institute of Development Administration in Then he taught the course at Assumption University in as well as teaching the course at King Mongkut s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in In the beginning, he taught the course in the classroom by using a textbook. Then, he replaced the textbook with Google and called it goolearning. This paper describes goolearning, Simple form of goolearning, Google for Term Project, Project Presentation, Webinar, Open-Google Examination, Google- Searching with Image Rather than Words. Keywords- goolearning, Management Information Systems, Srisakdi Charmonman IT Center. 1. INTRODUCTION A relatively new form of learning in Thailand is elearning which may be said to start in the year 2002 when the author drafted the first elearning law in Thailand to allow all universities to offer complete degree program in the elearning mode [1]. In the year 2002, the author convinced the Board of Trustees of Assumption University of Thailand to establish the College of Internet Distance Education (CIDE) with the author as the Chairman of the Executive Board and the Chief Executive Officer. The College is a semi-autonomous organization in the university and run by the executives with the titles similar to those in business. The positions are the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) similar to the President of a university, the Chief Academic Officer (CAO) similar to the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) similar to the Vice President for Administration, and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) similar to the Vice President for Information Technology. The College is housed at Srisakdi Charmonman IT Center with 12 floors of 1,000 square meters per floor. The building and equipment valued at about 15 US$ million is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Srisakdi Charmonman IT Center The Sixth International Conference on elearning for Knowledge-Based Society, December 2009, Thailand 1.1

2 Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman After 3 years (2002 to 2005) of lobbying 5 Ministers of the Cabinet, sending many letters to the Prime Minister and, in his capacity as Chairman of the easean Business Cuncil, convinced 10 Ministers of ASEAN to endorse elearning. The author was successful in getting the decree published in the Royal Garzette in October Then, in January 2006, Assumption University became the first university in Thailand to offer a complete elearning degree program. That program was Master of Science in Management, with the author as the Program Director [2]. With the popularity of mobile phones, elearning has been extended to mlearning by replacing the computers with the mobile phones and modifications of courseware. Then, elearning and mlearning are combined with learning by all other ways and means and the combination is called ulearning. There are many definitions of elearning such as learning thru electronic means with the Internet as the most popular choice. However, the author prefers the definition from the Sloan Consortium [3] which states that elearning is learning in which % of the learning activities are carried out thru the Internet. In elearning, there are two types of instructors, namely, the Subject Expert (or Content Expert) and the Facilitating Instructor. The Subject Expert is in charge of proposing the courseware and learning activities to be submitted to the committee which includes the subject expert, the instructional designer, the web designer, the web programmer, the graphic designer, the graphic programmer, the video editor, the audio editor, and the project coordinator. At the opening of the discovery learning library at Lumpini Park, as shown in Figure 2, HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn has said that if you would like to have any knowledge, you could ask Professor Goo or Google. So, the author modified his Management Information Systems (MIS) course to be based on acquiring knowledge from Google and called it goolearning. Figure 2. HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Graciously Opened the Discovery Learning Library at Lumpini Park 2. SIMPLE FORM OF GOOLEARNING The MIS course covers 15 weeks, each week with 3 hours. In the first hour, the author hands out the course description, the course activities, guidelines for knowledge acquisition from Google, and related materials. The author s MIS course includes Midterm examination 30% Final examination 40% Term Project Report 15% Presentation of Term Project 5% Attending Seminars 10% As a matter of fact, searching Charmonman TV Program form Google, the first entry is shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. Searching Charmonman TV Program Special Issue of the International Journal of the Computer, the Internet and Management, Vol. 17 No. SP3, December,

3 GooLearning in a Management Information System Course Figure 4. TV Program: Management Information Systems (MIS) Clicking further to TV Program: Management Information Systems (MIS), there is a list of 42 TV clips each with about one hour as shown in Figure 4. The 42 TV lectures are equal to the 45 hours less three hours for the final examination. 1) Overview of MIS 2) Information Systems and the Internet 3) Searching for Information from the Internet 4) Dot Com Companies 5) Payment Systems for Dot Com 6) Intranet in Organizations 7) Why Information Systems? 8) New Opportunities with Information Systems 9) Types of IS in Organizations 10) Applications of IS 11) Impacts of IS to Organizations 12) Impacts of IS on Decision Making 13) ecommerce 14) ebusiness 15) Moral in IS 16) Ethics in IS 17) Privacy and IS 18) IT Infrastructure 19) Hardware 20) Software 21) File Organization 22) Database Development and Trend 23) Telecommunications 24) Internet Technology and Services 25) Wireless Network 26) mcommerce 27) Vulnerability in IS 28) Searching and Privacy in IS 29) Technology and Tools for Security 30) Organization-wide IS 31) Supply Chain Management 32) Customer Relationship Management 33) Knowledge Management 34) Artificial Intelligence 35) Decision Support Systems 36) Executive Support Systems 37) Planning of IS 38) Development of IS 39) Value of MIS 40) Factors for Successful IS 41) International IS 42) Organization of International IS In each weekly period of three hours, students are given topics to be covered. Each and all students are instructed to search Google for information about the topic. For example, the first topic is Management Information System. Searching define: management information systems from Google yields 3 entries as shown in Figure 5. Three students are assigned to scan each of the three entries. If there are terms not clear in the explanation, Google is again used to acquire information about them. The Sixth International Conference on elearning for Knowledge-Based Society, December 2009, Thailand 1.3

4 Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman be assigned to the third student. The instructor has to acquire knowledge before meeting with the class in order to make sure that the class would not wander around without covering what should be covered in that period according to the schedule of classes. Figure 5. define: management information systems 3. GOOGLE FOR TERM PROJECT In addition to topics to be covered in the 15 periods of the 3-credit course, knowledge acquisition for the term project could and should be done by use of Google. The instructor may demonstrate to the students how to search Google for all the knowledge or most of the knowledge to be supplemented from other sources. Searching Google for Term Project entries were found as shown in Figure 7. A very interesting entry is Your Name the Term Project-CustomPaper.com Can Do It.[4] Figure 6. Searching Management Information Systems The next step would be to remove the word define:, i.e. searching only for management information systems which yields over 200,000 entries as shown in Figure 6. Assigning students to read all of those 200,000 entries would be a big waste of time. So, students may be asked to vote for 4-5 entries to be investigated. The first example may be a PDF file on handbook on management information systems from the US government at It may be assigned to a student to quickly scan and summarize it to the class. The second example may be Management information systems explained from the UK, to be assigned to the second student. The third example may be the journal of management information systems at to Figure 7. Searching Google for Term Project For a price, the web claims to be able to provide student with research and academic source material, composing tests, necessary visual component or graphics for the term project, editing and rewriting, and most importantly, originality. They claim that every term project they complete is 100% original and free of plagiarism. However, in the classes the author has been teaching, he emphasizes to students that if a student uses the service of Custompapers.com or similar organizations, that student would be dismissed from the University. Special Issue of the International Journal of the Computer, the Internet and Management, Vol. 17 No. SP3, December,

5 GooLearning in a Management Information System Course The final result of a term project is the project report. So, student should search something like Project Report from google which give 196 million entries as shown in Figure 8. Figure 10. Easy Presentation Project Figure 8. Searching Project Report in Google with 196 million Entries Clicking project report template results in 18.3 million entries. Students should consult the professor which entries are acceptable. 4. PROJECT PRESENTATION After the project report has been prepared, each group of 2-3 students has to present the project. The student could search Google for Project Presentation and would fond 98.9 million entries as shown in Figure 9. For example, if the first entry is clicked, the result is shown in Figure WEBINAR The MIS course requires students to attend three webinars, about one per month. Searching Google for Webinar Management Information Systems resulted in 663,000 entries. The instructor may find a free webinar each month for students to attend and write a short report on it. Alternately, the instruction may download free webinar software and invite a local expert to conduct the webinar. An example is shown in Figure 11 which may be on free trial for 30 days and later, 69 US$ per month. Figure 11. A Webinar Software Figure 9. Searching Project Presentation in Google with 98.9 million Entries 6. OPEN-GOOGLE EXAMINATION Similar to open-book examination in which students are allowed to bring any number of books to the examination room, The Sixth International Conference on elearning for Knowledge-Based Society, December 2009, Thailand 1.5

6 Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman open-google examination allows students to have access to Google during the threehour examination. In Thailand, examination has to be proctored. The College of Internet Distance Education of Assumption University of Thailand has been arranging proctored examination for student in many countries. A proctor arranged by the College may be a member of the Thai embassy or an instructor at the local educational institution. The student has to pay the proctor according to the rate established by the College. The proctor s duties include checking that the student is the one who registered for the course, checking that the student dose not use the Internet to get someone else to answer the examination questions for him, and enforce the 3 hours limit for the period of the exam. When the student is ready to hand in the examination answers, the proctor ensures that the name and students ID are included with the answers that student hands in. Similar to open-book exam in which the questions do not explicitly appear in the books, open-google exam should not have guestion explicitly in Google. The question should be of applied or analysis nature. 7. GOOGLE-SEARCHING WITH IMAGE RATHER THAN WORDS Google has been announcing new services from time to time and they may be used in GooLearning. An example is Google Goggles which was announcement on December 8, 2009 [5]. In the earlier search of Google, key words were used. In Google Goggles, instead of words, users can use photograph, work of art or logo. Google Goggles is available for free download onto mobile phone with the Android operation system. A user can focus his mobile phone camera on an object or a landmark. Then Google Goggles would try to match the image with tens of millions of images in its databases. Hopefully, the service will be available for use on notebooks and desktop computers later. 8. CONCLUDING REMARKS The main advantage of GooLearning is that students do not have to buy textbooks. Almost all kinds of information can be found by searching Google. GooLearning could be done in the classroom mode or the elearning mode. This paper presented goolearning as an alternative to classical classroom learning, elearning, mlearning, and ulearning. The tools and techniques of goolearning will probably be improved from time to time. REFERENCES 1. Webmaster of Srisakdi Charmonman IT Center, The father of Thai elearning, accessed on 1 October Charmonman, S. Knowledge Acquisition with elearning, mlearning, ulearning, and goolearning. Keynote Address at the 2nd International Symposium on Knowledge Acquisition and Modeling, organized by IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, HuaZhong Normal University, Wuhan, China, December 1, Charmonman, S. Overview of elearning. Keynote address at Production of elearning Courseware Training, for Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. Supported by UNESCO and Information for All Program (IFAP) at Assumption University, Suvarnabhumi Campus. March 16, CustomPapers.com: Custom Writing and Research. Your Name the Term Project- CustomPapers.com Can Do IT Google. Google Goggles is new several tool. uk.news-yahoo.com/21/ /, accessed on 8 December Special Issue of the International Journal of the Computer, the Internet and Management, Vol. 17 No. SP3, December,