'Hey professor, why are you teaching this class?' Reflections on the relevance of IS research for undergraduate students

摘要

'Hey professor, why are you teaching this class?' An undergraduate student confronted me with this question on the first day of the information systems (IS) core course that I taught this past semester. In recent years, my work life has been devoted to administrative work as department chair, service to the academic community on editorial boards, research projects and publications, and doctoral seminars and graduate courses. These are the types of scholarly activities that build the IS field, and that IS faculty typically assume quite willingly. Undergraduate teaching has been on the metaphoric 'back burner' for me even as I fretted along with colleagues about the causes and consequences of low enrollments in undergraduate IS programs and the resulting decline in resources for IS faculty (cf. Panko, 2008; Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2009). As department chair, I had assigned myself to teach this course, so surely I had a good reason for doing so! Yet, I was unable to produce a compelling answer. Had I simply reflected the student's question back to him (a useful rhetorical strategy when caught off guard) - 'Hey student, why are you taking this class?' - the answer would have been easy: 'Because I have to, it's a requirement'. Explanations that entailed the pressures of university budget cuts, reduced enrollments in IS major courses, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business accreditation requirements, teaching load balance across the faculty, or other administrative trivia seemed uninspired and uninspiring.