Lovely start to 2018

Received a new year greeting from a former student today:

Happy new year to you! Long time have not contacted you but I really want to thank you again at this time for the IS intro courses you brought to me! I am now doing a tech-startup intern which is platform-oriented, and I found the concept I learnt from the course really helps me understand the work and think about the business logically. I am now doing the major of dual degree in CS and business and want to explore the tech industry more. Hope I have the chance in the future to hear great insights from you like I did in the 2010 courses! Thank you so much! Wish you a happy and enriching 2018!

It is always nice to hear from students that what they learnt in my courses actually help them in their work and cause them to explore more. Coincidentally, I was in the middle of preparing and revising the syllabus for the said Intro. to IS course for the coming semester when I received the email. For the last few years, my colleagues and I have been teaching this course in a “reformed” way: instead of simply teaching off an introductory textbook, we try to make the course more relevant and applicable by covering certain key IS topics and ideas in today’s economy (e.g., platform economics, social media strategy, big data analytics, etc.) as well as traditional core IS concepts. However, some students feel that the way  this course has been taught does not help them in the other IS courses that they take subsequently. A senior colleague heard such feedback and suggested that we should perhaps teach the Intro. to IS course in a more “traditional” manner — just like how introductory courses for marketing and accounting are being structured, where the focus is on the fundamentals, basic principles, etc. in the respective disciplines. Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to decide whether/how to revert the course to the way it was taught in the old days and which topics to drop. Well, the student’s greeting just made the decisions clearer.