The 6th workshop of the Erasmus + MASTIS project “ESTABLISHING MODERN MASTER-LEVEL STUDIES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS” was held on November 27-30, 2017 in the University of Agder, Kristiansand (Norway).
The meeting was organized by the professors of the IS Department of University of Agder (UiA), which is part of the ERCIS research network.
Partners from Ukraine took part in it (S. Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economic – National Coordinator, National Polytechnic University “KhPI”, Lviv National Polytechnic University, Vinnitsa National Polytechnic University, National Polytechnic University “KPI”, Kherson State University).
The working meeting of the partners was devoted to the development of the Master’s program in the field of Information Systems, the improvement of the quality of education and the latest pedagogical methods in teaching and learning.
The main tasks of the workshop were presentation and discussion of courses developed by partners: MIS and Data Warehousing (Presenter – KhPI), Management of IS Projects (Presenter – KhNUE), Innovations and Entrepreneurship (Presenter – LPI), IT Infrastructure (Presenter – VNTU), IS Development and (Presenter – KPI), Enterprise Architecture Management (Presenter – KSU), IS Strategy (Presenter – UDG, UMI), IS Security (Presenter – UDG, UMI).
During the workshop, participants learned about the logistics part of university, teaching staff and the learning content. This experience will be certainly used at establishing Master’s program in Information Systems. The productive discussions between team’s members and the presentations of project results of each university were presented.
Much attention was paid to the presentation and discussion of innovative educational practices in managerial, technological, pedagogical and didactic perspectives.
Professor Leif S. Flak, Head of Information Systems Department of UiA, explained approaches, experience and main goals of the Department and its education program in Information Systems.
The Master Programme in Information Systems at UiA was presented by Associate Professor Eli Hustad, study program leader.
Life Long Learning (LLL) program at UiA – examples of IS courses at Master level was presented by prof. Øystein Sæbø.
Prof. Øystein Sæbø also described to partners his experience in using of Digital Tools in education. Experiences from digital teaching projects at UiA. He explained that his motivation is to increase «brain activity» in classes and education. He used digital tools to control the situations in class, monitoring students instead of sending them out to library or group rooms etc. Important to have a Face to Face dialog between student and teacher instead of a monologue. Mobile phones is used in classes/courses for podcasts, quizzes, videos, brainstorming tools.
Claus Wang, the project leader, and LMS manager made a presentation about CANVAS, learning management system which was set up in 2015 in 19 universities and colleges in Norway.
Professor Eli Hustad presented and demonstrated a real course in CANVAS, Eli has tried to make the course setup as easy for the student as possible. The students get important shortcuts presented in the main window, even if the original files are in a file hierarchy (accessible in the course module in CANVAS). Plagiarizing-tools are integrated into the system CANVAS.
Discussion requirements of Web-platform for teaching materials exchange (list of requirements and specifications) was organized.
Also, the discussion: Full circle multidisciplinary teamwork projects proposal and discussion / list of projects descriptions took place during the MASTIS project meeting.
During the meeting, questions were also considered on further actions to improve courses description and piloting.