Philip’s Annotations on the Managing the Digital Enterprise Course:

 

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VARK EXAMPLES:

Managing the Digital Enterprise

Available online at: Managing the Digital Enterprise

Instructor: Michael Rappa

School: North Carolina State University

 

Visual

The site has links to guest speakers using streaming video that can be viewed either by Realplayer or Quicktime.  Dr. Tony O'Driscoll, an executive in residence at NC state university from IBM was the speaker on one interesting realplayer video I watched and listened to.  (Available online at:( Tony O'Driscoll ). The topic of the video was the “Promise and Peril of Wireless e-Business: A Cross-Industry Overview”.  The video quality was not perfect on my windows 98 with a 56k modem computer.  However, the quality and timeliness of the information more than compensated for this. 

 

Aural

The streaming video mentioned under visual had audio included, of course.  The sound quality was not the highest quality, but that probably has more to do with my computer system and dial up modem than the production quality.  The sound quality was still very understandable.  As long as one is interested in the subject matter, they will probably continue to listen.  This provides another option of learning timely and relevant subject matter for the visually impaired and those with an aural learning style or preference.  It also provides variation for the rest of the learners who want to take advantage of this.

 

Read/Write

The course has a 15 modules with scores of linked readings, and thus provides more than an adequate supply of materials for the Read/Write oriented student or learner.  It brags that it uses neither textbook nor handouts.  All the material for the course can be found on the web. One of the numerous links to high caliber and credible text is to an online article with Harvard’s famous business strategy guru, Michael Porter (available online at: Michael Porter.)  Among others site enhancers by text, links to online articles by business philosophy pioneer Peter Drucker and links to the U.S. Department of Commerce add even more depth to the site.

 

Kinesthetic

I found no material presented in a material way, nor did I find examples of assimilation of knowledge using kinesthetic means.

 

Multiple Intelligences

The primary information presented was in text format, with some streaming videos with audio.  This held true for the site itself and for all of the links I sampled.  That this is a graduate level course may explain this to some extent. 

• There does not seem to be any means of using several of Gardiner’s eight intelligences in assimilation either.
• No material seems geared toward musical, naturalist, nor kinesthetic learners. 
• The online discussion forums allow create an outlet for assimilation of the information for interpersonal intelligence learners.
• Time for reflection should benefit learners of intrapersonal intelligence.
• Linguistic learners have access to all the text they need.
• Logical types will have ample opportunity and stimulation to use inductive and deductive reasoning, although not much room for mathematics on this site.

 

Interactivity

The site offers an interactive online discussion forum that appears to be asynchronous in nature.

 

Assessment

Assessment seems to be done by a mid-term and a final for the North Carolina State University students.  It is unclear what kind of assessment plan he uses for online non North Carolina State University learners who are allowed to register and take the course through the open course forum.

 

Accessibility:

The site provides an easily identifiable link to a text version at the top left hand corner of every page I visited. I tested nine of these text version pages, and all were Bobby 508 conditionally compliant, depending on user checks.

 

The graphics version did not fare as well on Bobby interpreted section 508 compliance.   There were 17 instances without alt tags for images, 2 instances of needing to explicitly associate form controls and their labels with the LABEL element, and 1 instance of Include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas.  There were also numerous user checks necessary to make the page compliant.   A test of the graphic version of the schedule page revealed similar compliance problems.  The graphic page on intelligent agents contained a similar number of compliance issues, but most could be very easily fixed.  They were caused by not having alt tags for images.

 

Applications to Electronic Commerce 101 Online

This site has many features I really want to add to my course.  The fact that my proposed course is an undergraduate course and that this is a graduate course limits the transferability of these features.  It does contain articles on web site design that will be useful.  Many of the high quality readings would be usable, and some of the streaming video and audio presentation may be of value to advanced undergraduate students to enhance the value of my course.  Due to possible bandwidth problems, I don’t think I could assign the streaming videos as required for class. 

 

 

           

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