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A portal model for interactive learning: business education.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This paper examines course development in a business education class that provides students with interactive learning opportunities based on team projects and cross-curricular learning activities implemented in an academic Web portal space. This teaching and learning model enables students to conduct research using online business databases, analyze their research in teams, and then publish the results of their analysis on the World Wide Web via the academic portal.

Introduction: Challenges in Business Education

As we move into the 21st century, organizations are attempting to manage and make sense of an "internetworked" world where information technology (IT) refuses to slow its growth, or neatly arrange the information overload it produces. In their 1999 article about databases, Larson and Levine report that as many business managers strive to ensure their investments in IT produce useful information for business decisions, they voice the common complaint that their companies are "data rich and information poor" (p.8).

Several real world examples serve to illustrate the difficulties in managing and sharing knowledge in the workplace. In a white paper they published in 2000, Klynveld, Peat, Marwick, Goerdeler (KPMG) surveyed executives and managers from 423 businesses (with revenues of at least $300 million dollars) in Europe and the United States about their company's initiatives in the Knowledge Management (KM) arena. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents felt that KM could play a "very significant" role in improving their company's competitive advantage in the marketplace. At the same time, 65 percent of the respondents reported that they suffered from information overload; 62 percent said that their employees wanted to share knowledge, but do not have the time; and 55 percent reported that their employees are not using the technology available to them on the job to share knowledge effectively.

Losses suffered by companies when knowledge is not shared or retained are illustrated by a recent interchange between the Russian government and International Harvester. Silver (2000) reported that Russian officials approached the company about building a new truck factory: "The Russians chose Harvester because it had built a plant in Russia 20 years earlier. But what the Russians had remembered, Harvester had 'forgotten'--there wasn't a single soul still in the organization who knew anything about the previous project" (p.28).

These examples highlight the fact that colleges and universities need to foster teaching and learning...

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