Increasing Secondary Education Students’ Understanding of the Information Systems Field

Abstract

Information Systems (IS) among other Information Technology (IT) disciplines has been concerned with student recruitment while students in secondary education have little knowledge of the field and few end up choosing it as their career. We piloted an IS-oriented entrepreneurship course in a Finnish secondary school (aged 16-19) to examine how we can change student understanding of the IS/IT field. We gathered data through observation, questionnaires, essays, and teacher interviews, and returned two years later for a follow-up inquiry on how the course lived on in the school. In this article, we examine what kind of value was created for the stakeholders and study the negotiation of meanings around the image of IS/IT by the students and the teacher. We contribute insights on the collaboration that serves as a form of marketing of IS education and point to factors that can affect the continued existence of this kind of course.