Engaging students in an MIS course through the creation of E-business: A self-determination theory analysis

Abstract

We describe an entrepreneurial approach for teaching a management information systems (MIS) course. The course builds on the psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness to encourage student motivation and engagement. Students are required to create new electronic businesses and to build prototypes of their electronic Web fronts. Students are also required to use the concepts taught in the course and to analyze the ventures’ strategies, related network externalities, and business processes and data analytics. The course has been taught since 2009 to five classes and more than two-hundred students. Using student evaluation questionnaires and four detailed interviews, we found that more than half of the students were enthusiastic about the new approach: they felt satisfied and even proud of their projects. However, a minority of students found the course overcomplicated and even boring. We also found that students who expressed autonomy orientation engaged with the course, while students who expressed impersonal or controlled orientation did not. We believe that this analysis should help instructors in aligning new teaching opportunities created by IT to fit students’ orientations and needs.