An Active, Reflective Learning Cycle for E-Commerce Classes: Learning about E-commerce by Doing and Teaching

Active, experiential learning is an important component in information systems education, ensuring that students gain an appreciation for both practical and theoretical information systems concepts. Typically, students in active, experiential classes engage in real world projects for commercial companies or not-for-profit organizations. In the latter case, such engagements are often referred to as „service learning‟ or „community-engaged education‟. In this paper, we describe a novel capstone information systems class where, instead of undertaking a conventional single-team, singleproject experiential engagement, the students initiated a fully-fledged new not-for-profit organization from the ground up. The not-for-profit organization, The Online Business Guidebook, was founded with the mission of providing public education on how to start and grow an online business. In an unusual twist on a typical e-commerce class, the students both implemented e-commerce technologies (“active learning by doing”) and created and disseminated e-commerce training materials (“reflective learning / learning by teaching”), rather than solely being recipients of instructional resources. This paper describes the manner in which this class was run, the learning outcomes set and evaluation methods used, problems encountered, and recommendations. We propose a replicable model and specific learning outcomes for information systems educators who wish to teach e-commerce classes with an active and reflective pedagogical approach.