Preparing to teach a large online Information Systems course

In the spring of 2011, I accepted the assignment to teach a complete online class ISYS 263 - Introduction to Information Systems. The course includes both IS theory as well as applied learning of spreadsheets. At first, teaching a course to 650 students without any TAs seemed like a daunting task. Concerned about making the right pedagogical choices, I reached out to the Higher Education Teaching and Learning community on linkedin.com with the post: "I am going to teach a large online class in the Fall (650 students), what suggestions do you have?" and received within a span of a month over 90 responses and some great suggestions.  As an aside, the number of students enrolled has now reached 700.

During the summer, I worked with a colleague, Don, to put together the syllabus and choose the vendors that would facilitate teaching an online course efficiently and effectively. It quickly became apparent that www.Aplia.com would be the vendor of choice for the e-book because their system allowed for automated quizzes for the learners. The fact that the college of Business at SFSU had been very successful in delivering a Business Communication class to over 800 undergraduates per semester added to our comfort level in choosing Aplia. Since the course also included a spreadsheet component, we needed to choose a tool for independent learning and testing of spreadsheets. We chose SAM2010 from Cengage (sam2010.course.com).

Finally, we had to settle on the textbooks for both Aplia and SAM2010. After surveying the available textbooks, we settled on two: "Stair / Reynolds, Fundamentals of Information Systems, 6th Edition" for the IS portion and "Parsons, Oja, Ageloff and Carey MS Excel 2010, Brief" for the spreadsheet. Both books would be purchased by the learners in e-book format. In the next post, I will discuss putting together the syllabus and creating the courses in Aplia and SAM2010.