It is always a question how to teach in a fast-moving technological subject. There is risk that the technical content will be obsolete by the end of the degree program, or shortly after its completion. Our philosophy is that professionals must learn not technology alone, but how to keep up with technology. An equally important precept of our program is that skills cannot be taught, but must be learned. We follow these principles through a unique program specifically designed to produce eBusiness professionals.
We do not give traditional classes. While students are allowed to take a limited number or traditional elective courses in other departments, the eBusiness MSIT program does not offer a single course of its own. We believe that the meta-skills required for success in the workplace, such as team building, time management, interpreting confusing or ambiguous assignments, professional writing and public speaking, can be acquired only through direct and extensive practice. Toward that end, the program consists first of 16 realistic eBusiness tasks that are so extensive they must be completed by teams. Accordingly, the students are initially divided into teams of five people who receive task descriptions every 2-3 weeks for 10 months.
The students must produce professional deliverables, such as reports, technology analyses, business plans and system designs. Because the teams operate independently with minimal guidance, the students themselves must learn to organize themselves, divide workload, become familiar with relevant technologies, and separate important from irrelevant reference material to complete the assigned work on schedule.
Many of our graduates aspire to be consultants, and consulting preparation is sound training for almost any information technology job. Therefore, to make the degree program as realistic as possible, all students become “employees” of a hypothetical company, ebConsultants LLP, for the 12-month duration of the program. As staff consultants, the students rotate through four assignments in each of the company’s practices: Health Care, Financial, Retail and Logistics. Team composition changes at each transition, so the students have a chance to exercise their organizational skills at different times. To compress 10 months into a single sentence, the most crucial skill the students acquire is learning how to teach themselves. That skill is valuable for a lifetime and outlasts any conceivable shift in technology.