Orakwue Bay Arinze

Background: The recent COVID-19 pandemic forced most universities into online course delivery. As such, the rapid expansion of online learning and the prospect of its permanent increase for many institutions have sharpened the issue of the efficacy of remotely delivered courses. Literature review: Past studies have compared face-to-face (FTF) courses with online courses, with mixed results. However, the broad understanding is that efficacy differs based on the subject area. Educators frequently view theory-based courses as being better suited to online teaching than hands-on or experiential courses. Research question: Can information technology courses-especially those that are more experiential and technical-be supported through online learning given the extent of differences in efficacy between online and face-to-face experiential, technical courses? Research methodology: We compared multiple sections of an experiential IT Outsourcing class over several quarters in two course delivery modes. The two modes were FTF delivery and online synchronous delivery. Students in each course section responded to two surveys where they rated their knowledge of different topics at the start and end of the course. Results: Online students reported greater increases in learning on average across all measured items. Self-reported knowledge gains were significantly greater in five items, mostly in soft skills and project management knowledge. The only significantly improved technical IT skill was in using software for virtual meetings. Conclusions and implications for education: We conclude that universities should embrace teaching experiential IT-based courses virtually, as it is possible to obtain greater improvements in self-efficacy, counter to much existing research. This is especially the case as instructional technology improves.

A line of research has examined the relationship between economic freedom (EF) and countries’ outcomes, such as gross domestic product, finding that EF generally advances good outcomes (Hall & Lawson, Contemporary Economic Policy, 2014). Other studies have found that more EF is associated with outcomes, such as lower state-level unemployment rate and higher state bond rating for states in the United States (Belasen et al., Contemporary Economic Policy, 2015; Cebula, Journal of Economics and Finance, 2019). However, research dealing with how state-level EF affects firm-level decisions is sparse. In particular, how EF influences the predictive ability of accruals for forecasting future cash flows remains unexplored. This study fills this gap by examining how EF influences the relationship between components of accruals and future cash flows. In so doing, the study contributes to the literature that examines the effect of EF by highlighting the importance of EF on the information environment of firms. The study also extends research on the relationship between accruals and future cash flows by showing how EF affects the relationship.

Data Analytics has grown dramatically in importance and in the level of business deployments in recent years. It is used across most functional areas and applications, some of the latter including market campaigns, detecting fraud, determining credit, identifying assembly line defects, health services and many others. Indeed, the realm of analytics has famously grown to include major league sports and even U.S. election campaigns. Universities have raced to include data analytics in their curricula as the need for data scientists has become more acute. Unfortunately, many data science courses in college curricula suffer from various deficiencies: some lack a hands-on component, others are insufficiently experiential, and yet others leave students with too few transferable skills. This article describes an experiential approach to teaching data analytics at the college level that uses an election simulation, MISSimulation.com-to communicate key data science concepts in a competitive setting. Many universities actively use the simulation, combined with analytic tools such as Tableau and Excel, to implement team competition. We explore key techniques used and knowledge learned during the typical teaching of a data analytics course using the simulation. We end with pedagogical review of data analytics skills transferred during the course and student feedback.

This paper proposes a framework of incremental approaches to bring globalization into a university curriculum. These elements are: Infusion, Insertion, Interfacing, Interchange, and Immersion. We utilized an Interfacing case study, where a newly developed course teamed MIS students in the (US) Business School with students at major universities in India to solve real-world business problems. This Global Classroom leveraged interactive technologies to bring students together. We discuss the course progression, dynamics of student interactions, impacts of differing cultures, and overall outcomes, which were positive. We end with impacts of such global classroom implementations and teaching tips for implementing global education.

E-Collaboration has come of age in the last decade, with industry and academia using the latest web-based collaborative software to bring together groups of workers to work on common tasks. Research is a $370 billion industry in the United States and is conducted in every sector of the economy. It has collaboration at its core. Most innovations result from collaborative efforts between groups of workers who are often geographically dispersed. Academic leaders now seek the synergies that result from collaboration between their research faculty and others. Web 2.0- based research portals have emerged that allow knowledge sharing and lowering of social barriers between researchers. Another important development is cloud computing, which has dramatically reduced computing costs for organizations. These tools allow researchers in both industry and academia to extend their range and reach, gain synergies between dispersed groups, and increase research efficiency and effectiveness. This paper examines the use of e-research collaboration tools in industry and academia. It describes a framework that matches an organization's e-research collaboration needs to e-research collaboration solutions across several critical dimensions. The proposed framework will help to improve the understanding of available options for e-collaboration infrastructures, particularly in the sub-area of e-research. It will also help to identify the fit between these infrastructures and organizational e-research collaboration needs.

Due to skyrocketing healthcare costs, many hope for information technology to bring cost savings. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 earmarked $19 billion for healthcare IT, focusing on electronic health records. Other countries have also invested significantly in IT to reduce healthcare spending. IT’s impact on healthcare spending is thus of great interest to global healthcare policy makers. This paper examines how internet and personal computer use affect country-level healthcare spending for private and public healthcare organisations in 148 countries. We discovered significant differences in the impact of internet and personal computer use on healthcare cost savings in private vs. public healthcare settings. We examine the reasons for these differences and contrast them between developing vs. developed countries. We also find that the relationship between healthcare spending and IT is conditional on country-level institutional features, such as investor protections and corruption; and we discuss the study’s practical implications.

Cloud computing has spread within enterprise faster than many other IT innovations. In cloud computing, computer services are accessed over the Internet in a scalable fashion, where the user is abstracted in varying degrees from the actual hardware and software and pays only for resources used. This paper examines the adoption of cloud computing in various regions of the world, as well as the potential of cloud computing to impact computing in developing countries. The authors propose that cloud computing offers varying benefits and appears differently in regions across the world, enabling many users to obtain sophisticated computing architectures and applications that are cost-prohibitive to acquire locally. The authors examine issues of privacy, security, and reliability of cloud computing and discuss the outlook for firms and individuals in both developing and developed countries seeking to utilize cloud computing for their computing needs.

By integrating Media Richness Theory, Channel Expansion Theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we study the postadoption use behavior of instant messaging. We developed the construct "use richness" as a measure of the extent to which users use the media communication capacity after adoption and proposed a conceptual model of the antecedents of use richness. Through a field survey with 272 valid responses and structural equation modeling, we empirically tested our model and found that use richness is positively affected by perceived media richness, perceived usefulness, and perceived social usefulness.

Contemporary end users are more knowledgeable about computing technologies than the end users of the early ’80s. However, many researchers still use the end user classification scheme proposed by Rockart and Flannery (1983) more than two decades ago. This scheme is inadequate to classify contemporary end users since it is based mainly on their knowledge and ignores other crucial dimensions such as control. Cotterman and Kumar (1989) proposed a user cube to classify end users based on the development, operation, and control dimensions of end user computing (EUC). Using this cube, users can be classified into eight distinct groups. In this research, a 10-item instrument is proposed to operationalize the user cube. Such an instrument would help managers to identify the status of EUC in their firms and to take appropriate action. Based on the data collected from 292 end users, the instrument was tested for construct, convergent, and discriminant validities. Researchers can use this instrument to study the interaction between constructs such as development and control with end user computing satisfaction (EUCS).