Innovating in the MIS Core Course - Bridging Business and Technology

The challenge of teaching the MIS core course is markedly different from that of more advanced courses taken by MIS majors. In the MIS core course, the goals of bringing knowledge to non-MIS majors that they will find relevant yet grounding that knowledge in the core of the IS discipline, which to a significant degree is inescapably technical, have to be reconciled. Non-MIS majors typically want to know only about the business implications of IS, yet the business aspects of IS cannot be so neatly separated from the technology dimension of IS. This paper describes a pilot offering of the MIS core course where business majors had to work with software technology at a hands-on level. A survey was administered to the students and the data analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance and logistic regression techniques to assess learning outcomes in both the business and technology dimensions of IS.