An Introductory Course in an Undergraduate Ecommerce Technology Degree Program

1
An Introductory Course in an UndergraduateE-comme
rce Technology Degree Program

• Amber Settle
• Assistant Professor
• CTI, DePaul University
• ISECON
• November 2, 2001

2
Outline

• School of CTI at DePaul University
• Undergraduate e-commerce technology program
• ECT 250 Survey of e-commerce technology course
• Web development sequence
• A balanced approach
• Course overview
• Future in the undergraduate CTI programs

3
DePaul CTI

• School of Computer Science, Telecommunications,
• and Information Systems
• Faculty size (Fall 2001)
• 80 full-time faculty
• 100 part-time faculty
• Enrollments (Spring 2001)
• Undergraduate 1575
• Graduate (M.S.) 2096
• Ph.D. 40
• Undergraduate programs CS, CGA, ECT,
• HCI, IS , NT
• Graduate programs CS, CGA, DS, ECT,
• HCI, IS, SE, TDC.

4
E-commerce technology

• M.S. in E-commerce technology
• Introduced in September 1999
• See related papers Knight 2001
• Generated undergraduate interest
• B.S. in E-commerce technology
• Introduced in September 2000
• Focus areas include Programming, user-
• centered interface design, system design,
• technology of databases, networking, and
• middleware.
• Enrollment (September 2001) 65

5
Web development

• Web development courses in the B.S. in ECT
• ECT 250 Survey of e-commerce technology
• ECT 270 Client-side Web application development
• HTML
• Cascading Style Sheets
• DHTML using JavaScript
• ECT 353 Server-side Web application development
• Development of small-scale e-commerce transaction
• applications. Current technologies ASP,
  VBScript.

6
Introductory courses

• Breadth-first approach
• General survey of important topics
• See related papers
• Bagert, Marcy, and Calloni, 1995
• King and Barr, 1997
• McFall and Stegink, 1997
• Depth-first approach
• A particular technology in detail
• See related papers
• Mercuri, Herrmann, and Popyack, 1998
• Hermann and Popyack, 1994
• Kolesar and Allan, 1995

7
A balanced approach

• Combine breadth and depth topics
• Provides a broad framework and sufficient
• experience to understand the significance of
• an area
• Finding the balance can be challenging
• Example Reed 2001
• The key for ECT 250 Survey of e-commerce
  technology
• Using a Web development tool

8
The breadth topics

• The Internet and WWW
• E-commerce hardware and software
• Security
• Electronic payment systems
• Marketing, sales, and promotion
• Purchasing, logistics, and support activities
• International, ethical, and legal issues
• Key themes Importance of standards, rapidly
• changing nature of the field, relative importance
• of B2B vs. B2C

9
The depth topics

• FrontPage
• Graphic formats
• Publishing Web pages
• FTP
• Telnet
• Unix commands
• Markup languages
• Issues surrounding frames
• Web page design
• Focus Preparation for subsequent Web development
  
• courses

10
The course

• Textbook Electronic Commerce, Schneider Perry
• Ten weeks, two lectures of 1 ½ hours per week
• Lecture topics
• Breadth 11 lectures
• Depth 7 lectures
• Midterm and final exam
• Students from CTI, Commerce, and Liberal Arts
• All undergraduate class levels

11
Assignments and exams

• Weekly assignments 8
• Orientation via an e-mailed survey
• Web page creation and publication
• Home page, shrine page, subject page
• Survey topics
• E-commerce and networking basics, Web
• hosting options, computer forensics, basic
• encryption
• Comprehensive exams 2
• True/false, matching, short answer, essay

12
Future

• New textbook
• E-commerce Business, Technology, Society.
• Laudon Traver
• Inclusion into new programs
• Undergraduate ECT, IS, NT (Fall 2001)
• Increase in enrollment
• Fall 2000 Two sections
• Fall 2001 Five sections
• Winter 2002 Six sections
• A redesign of CSC 200 Survey of computer
• technology

13
References

• Bagert, Donald, William Marcy, and Ben Calloni,
  1995, A Successful
• Five-year Experiment with a Breadth-first
  Introductory Course.
• SIGCSE Bulletin 27(1) 116-120.
• Herrmann, Nira, and Jeffrey Popyack, 1994, An
  Integrated, Software-
• based Approach to Teaching Introductory Computer
  Programming.
• SIGCSE Bulletin 27(1) 92-96. spreadsheets
• King, L.A. Smith, and John Barr, 1997, Computer
  Science for the Artist.
• SIGCSE Bulletin 29(1) 150-153. graphics
• Kolesar, Mary, and Vicki Allan, 1995, Teaching
  Computer Science
• Concepts and Problem Solving with a Spreadsheet.
  SIGCSE Bulletin
• 27(1) 10-13.
• McFall, Ryan, and Gordon Stegink, 1997,
  Introductory Computer Science
• for General Education Laboratories, Textbooks,
  and the Internet.
• SIGCSE Bulletin 29(1) 96-100.
• Mercuri, Rebecca, Nira Herrmann, and Jeffrey
  Popyack, 1998, Using
• HTML and JavaScript in Introductory Programming
  Courses.
• SIGCSE Bulletin 30(1) 176-180.
• Reed, David, 2001, Rethinking CS0 with
  Javascript. SIGCSE Bulletin
• 33(1) 100-104.