Combating the IS Enrolment Crisis in Australia: The Design and the Effectiveness of a Five-Minute IS Promotional Talk

This paper reports on the design and the effectiveness of a five-minute IS promotional talk that is used in one of the leading Australian universities to promote IS courses to existing accounting students. In particular, this paper explains in details the elements that were employed by the promotional talk to stimulate accounting students’ interest in IS courses and shaping their perception towards the IS discipline. The paper then develops an evaluation mode and a survey questionnaire, and uses structural equation modelling to evaluate the effectiveness of the promotional talk. Evaluation results show that, by providing useful and sufficient information regarding available IS courses and by providing justified reasons to take IS courses, the five-minute IS promotional talk is indeed effective in promoting accounting students’ interest in IS courses and their perception of the relevance of IS courses to their current degree.