Case study methodology in technology-focused Information Systems courses: examining the students' perspective

Despite the increasing popularity of the case study teaching methodology in computing education, papers reporting on actual implementations of case study-based computing courses are still scarce. Moreover, most of this work focuses on the teacher's perspective, thus, largely missing out the learner's perspective. Over a period of four years, the author of this paper has been systematically observing, capturing and analysing students' input as to the use of the case study methodology in an undergraduate Information Systems course. This paper reports on the methods which were used to capture the data, and it presents a brief analysis of this data.

I. Introduction

The case study methodology is becoming more and more popular in computing education. The rationale for making use of this teaching methodology is obvious: case studies provide wide opportunities to learn from examples, they support students in developing decision making skills in concrete, realworld like situations, and they encourage students to apply the acquired skills in similar contexts. Despite the obvious popularity of this teaching methodology, there is still a limited amount of research works or practice papers reporting on actual implementations of undergraduate or graduate computing courses largely based on case studies. In addition, only few studies exist which particularly focus on students’ perceptions of this teaching methodology. This conference contribution attempts to shed some light onto this highly interesting and very relevant topic.