Abstract:

In this article empirical and theoretical findings from a teaching case will be presented and discussed. The teaching case regards teaching and learning business process design. Business process design is regarded as one of the core competences within Informatics, a scientific discipline that develops knowledge about people's design and use of IT in individual, organizational and a societal settings context. The importance of Informatics has increased in step with the rapid digitalization of organizations and Society. One important pedagogical challenge that we meet during teaching business process design is, that the students should have the competence to make them attractive on the labor market and at the same time achieve the learning objectives in the course. A literature review has been done in major journals and conferences relating to teaching and business process design. One of the findings is that there has been a large focus on simulating cooperation in learning business process design. So far, during the literature survey, learning business process design through cooperation have not been thoroughly explored. Therefore, the research question is: How can we understand the teaching and learning in business process design that takes place in cooperative setting? The aim of the article is to gain an understanding of the teaching and learning in business process design that takes place in cooperative setting. The result is presented as lessons learned. The contribution of the research is an empirically and theoretically grounded conceptual model describing teaching and learning business process design. The conceptual model is proposed to support our understanding. The theoretical framework used in this article have two foundations, firstly to relate conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge to each other and secondly to apply learning theories of boundary practices regarding participation and reification. Participation is the direct interaction between members of a community and brokering is the interaction between communities. Reification is the creation and use of artifacts; between communities it is referred to as boundary objects. A business process design could be regarded as a boundary object and the activities of creating the business process design could be regarded as brokering. The business process design course has been running since 2014 and the collected empirical data in this article is based on students’ reflections presented in a written reports and the result from course evaluations over that period. The research approach is iterative and interpretive, the understanding of the empirical data has grown during the literature driven analysis. Two separate analyses where made: thematical and process oriented. Two of the themes is challenges and benefits. Teaching and learning in a cooperative setting are not an easy task, there are challenges that needs to be handled. One of them is organizations that has signed up to be part of the cooperative setting and later the students report back that the organization doesn’t have the time to take part. There are also benefits, the students grow when they realize that their procedural knowledge on business process design has an impact on the organization.

Keywords:

Teaching, learning, business process design, cooperation, boundary practice.