A Project Module of E-Commerce Planning

The development of a pedagogy that integrates scholastic knowledge and practical skills of e-commerce for business students is imperative. Students typically learn e-commerce planning through course projects. This note provides tips for designing and teaching an e-commerce planning project module for the e-commerce course.

Keywords: Electronic commerce, course project, business planning, clinical approach

1.INTRODUCTION

Ecommerce courses have been popular in business schools for more than seven years. E-commerce is the process of buying, selling, exchanging products, services, and information via computer networks (Turban and King 2003; Turban et al. 2004). Given the breadth of the subject, it is natural that there are a variety of approaches to teaching/learning e-commerce. Yet, they can be placed in two major categories: instructive and clinical.

In the instructive approach, students typically learn e-commerce concepts, a variety of new business models (e.g., revenue models and e-government models), and issues related to e-commerce (e.g., ethics issues and legal issues). Students get a general overview of e-commcrcc, perhaps practice e-commerce simulations, participate classroom case studies (Landon and Travers 2003; Schneider 2004), and/or learn the techniques of e-commerce implementation (Chopoorian and Wang 2004). However, in this approach it is not intended that students acquire first-hand experiences in e-commerce planning. When students learn e-commerce from lectures, they often remember little more than lists of buzzwords. On the other hand, in the clinical approach, students go out, find organizations, identify e-commerce opportunities for the organizations, determine e-commerce strategies for them, and initiate e-commerce business plans. Commonly, courses taught in the clinical approach are called project courses. The teaching philosophy of project courses is that people cannot learn without doing (Wang and Ariguzo 2004).

Given the restricted number of business elective courses in the AACSB curricula for business majors, it is ideal to have a single e-commerce course that integrates the two approaches. However, there are few textbooks that provide business students with guidelines for practical e-commerce projects. Teaching methods for e-commerce course projects are scarce in the IS education literature. This note describes design concepts for an c-commcrcc planning project module of an upper-level e-commerce course for undergraduate business majors and tips for teaching this module.

2. DESIGNING THE PROJECT MODULE

The objectives of the project module is to learn e-commerce planning, including strategy formulation, e-commerce implementation recommendations, and cost/benefit analysis, from a real case based on a local organization. Although students are expected to learn the broad foundation of e-commerce from the course, this project module is not aimed to technical Web application design, simple Web presence, or perceptive Web sites usability assessment.

Besides common difficult tasks in designing a project module, such as scheduling a feasible timetable, specifying project requirements for e-commerce projects is particularly challenging, given the variety of prospective topics of ecommerce planning. One set of requirements is unlikely to fit all categories of project themes. Based on our experiences of teaching this e-commerce project module in the past years, we have developed four sets of requirements for the four typical categories of e-commerce planning projects: catalog sales, B2B e-commerce, e-government, and virtual community. The primary themes and the general requirements for the four categories of e-commerce planning projects are summarized below.

2.1 Catalog Sales.

The project is to plan an online store for a firm to sale its products on the Internet. The project shall

1. Determine the catalog sales strategies for the firm, e.g., reach more customers and increase sales, lower transaction costs, and/or flexible work hours;

2. Develop and evaluate alternatives, e.g., build your own online store, apply for a Web host, or subscribe the eBay store or Yahoo Store;

3. Prepare cost/benefit comparison of the alternatives and recommendations;

4. Describe the steps to set up the online store, e.g., purchase domain name, purchase Web hosting, site implementation (hardware and software), security, payment options, and delivery arrangement;

5. Propose banner advertising/exchange; and

6. Prepare three-year prediction of cash flow.

2.2 B2B E-Commerce

The project is to plan a Web-based business network to improve the cooperation of the business partners. The project report must include

1. Current issues of the business network;

2. The B2B ?-commerce strategy, e.g., business alliance, lower transaction costs, improve the partner relationships, timely communication, share information, and speed cash flows;

3. The e-commerce model, e.g., the supply chain, purchasing and logistics (shown in workflow diagrams), fund transfer, and /or partner relationship management;