|
Article Excerpt
Instructors increasingly use a data modeling approach to teach accounting information systems (AIS). An important part of data modeling is the specification of cardinalities. Cardinalities represent constraints on the participation of entities in a relationship and are used to express business practices. Stevie is an Internet tool that helps students learn cardinalities. Stevie has a number of unique features. First, Stevie is a collaborative effort; its content is created by a number of instructors. Second, Stevie is a dynamic Internet application. Dynamic Internet technology enables instructors to manage student accounts, add exercises, and create customized assignments. Further, customized assignments make it easy for instructors to adapt Stevie's content to specific learning objectives for their AIS course. For example, instructors can create assignments where students have to define stereotypical cardinality patterns or heuristics for REA relationships. Finally, Stevie supports accounting-specific classi fications that make the creation of customized assignments for the AIS class easier.
Keywords: cardinalities; collaborative design; data modeling; Internet; REA accounting.
Data Availability: Contact the first author for access to Stevie.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the data modeling approach to accounting information systems (AIS) has become increasingly popular among AIS educators (Hollander et al. 2000; Romney and Steinbart 2000). Data modeling methodologies are used to create conceptual schemas. Conceptual schemas have a dual role (Eriksson and Penker 2000): (1) the description of the phenomena to be captured in the information system such as the economic activities of a company, and (2) the definition of the database structure. Typical concepts supported by most data modeling methodologies include entities, relationships, attributes, generalization, aggregation, and cardinalities. In accounting contexts, these concepts are often conveyed by AIS instructors using McCarthy's (1982) Resource-Event-Agent (REA) model as a framework. The REA model, which is grounded in economic and accounting theory, is a template that helps structure conceptual schemas in an accounting context and provides consistency in modeling enterprise phenomena across the value cha in.
Relationship cardinalities are one of several data modeling conventions commonly used to express business practices. Cardinalities in a data model indicate how entities participate in relationships. In an accounting context they are helpful for expressing the existence of phenomena such as down payments, prepayments, and open orders. Concepts of data modeling in general and relationship cardinalities in particular are recognized as being difficult to learn (Jarvenpaa and Machesky 1989; Batra et al. 1990; Batra and Davis 1992; Hollander et al. 2000). The instructional tool discussed in this paper, nicknamed "Stevie," is aimed at enhancing students' understanding of cardinalities.
Stevie is an online, between-instructor, collaborative learning tool that provides students with the opportunity to work through exercises on cardinalities outside of class. A previous version of Stevie has been described in the AIS literature. (1) The current paper describes an enhanced version of Stevie where instructors become content providers in a collaborative environment. There are two main categories of users for Stevie: students who learn cardinalities and instructors who design the content of the learning tool. For students, Stevie is an interactive learning tool, allowing them to solve cardinality exercises, submit their answers, and receive feedback. Using the Internet as the delivery mechanism, Stevie provides easy access for students at any time. For instructors, Stevie enables active participation in a collaborative environment. Instructors use their own specific expertise to contribute to the creation of exercises, share exercises with other instructors, manage student accounts, and create ass ignments adapted to specific learning objectives and learning strategies.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The first section explains the cardinality concept. Then, the design goals for Stevie as a collaborative Internet tool are described. Next, we depict Stevie as an interactive Internet tool for learning cardinalities, for the creation of cardinality exercises and customized assignments, and for the sharing of cardinality exercises among instructors. Finally, we discuss the use of Stevie in the AIS course in more detail. The concluding section summarizes the paper and discusses possibilities for future research involving Stevie including its use by students, its use by instructors, the sharing of content in a collaborative environment, and the collection of data utilizing dynamic Internet technology.
II. CARDINALITIES
Figure 1 illustrates an Entity-Relationship diagram that expresses a relationship (prefers) between two entities: customer and product. The relationship describes a customer's favorite product. We use the Batini et al. (1992) notation for cardinalities. Cardinalities express constraints that apply to the participation of the instances of an entity in a relationship. There are two different types of cardinalities: minimal cardinality and maximal cardinality.
A minimal cardinality denotes whether the participation of an occurrence in the relationship is mandatory (1) or optional (0). For the example in Figure 1, the participation of products in the "prefers" relationship is mandatory. This implies that a product occurrence will be considered only when it participates in the relationship. Stated differently, products are recorded only when they are the favorite product of at least one customer. The participation of a customer in the same relationship is "0" or optional. This implies that customer instances do not have to participate in the relationship. Stated differently, customers can be recorded without knowing their favorite product.
A maximal cardinality restricts the number of times an instance can participate in a relationship. A maximal cardinality of one (1) expresses that an instance can...
|
