Abstract:

Information technology (IT) and digital innovation (DI) is continuously reshaping everyday activities, affecting many aspects of our lives. Innovative digital artifacts are designed and implemented in a variety of contexts, targeting new user groups and application areas. Designing digital artifacts is a complex and challenging practice. Digital technology is an abstract design material and has been referred to as the material without properties. Furthermore, the contexts of IT use are varying and expanding, and ethics and sustainability are important to include in design.

In Information Systems (IS) education students are educated to design digital artifacts. When designing digital artifacts, in-depth understanding of use context and design settings is fundamental. An integral part in IS education is to prepare students for design practice and help them develop their ability to interpret and understand use contexts, as well as to develop design skills. Designer’s ability to interpret and understand design contexts is deeply rooted in experience. Such experience enables a repertoire of examples that guides design practice and problem solving.

New IS students have experiences from using computers, mobile devices, social media etc. During the IS education, students gain experiences of interaction design, programming, designing databases etc. These experiences are achieved through for example laboratory and project assignments. However, today students have limited experience from work practices outside of the educational setting. They have limited experience from the contexts that they will meet in their future design practice. This lack of experience is genuinely challenging to IS teaching. Not only is the digital material abstract per see. In addition, design contexts and concepts like organization, strategy and business model are abstract. Moreover, information technology develops rapidly and DI continuously expands to new use contexts.

Established theoretical models of learning point out experiences, reflections and cognitive coaching as crucial elements in learning. In this paper we address the challenge of bringing authenticity and contextual relevance to IS education. More specifically, we discuss teaching strategies to compensate for students lack of work experience, and to support students’ advancements in interpreting, conceptualizing and understanding IS phenomena. The ambition is to stretch the students’ level of potential development. Based on 20 years of teaching and designing IS education, we propose three strategies to bring authenticity and contextual relevance to IS education. The strategies are grounded in Vygotsky's concept zone of proximal development, and on Schön's reasoning on experience based learning.

The strategies proposed in the paper are:
(1) teaching by doing together,
(2) enable authentic experiences, and
(3) critical formative dialogue.

Keywords:

IS teaching strategies, authenticity, contextual relevance.