Foreword to the special issue of ICIS teaching cases
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& 2007 JIT Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 0268-3962/07 $30.00 palgrave-journals.com/jit
Editorial
Foreword to the special issue of ICIS teaching cases Sid Huff1, Carol V Brown2 1
School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand Stevens Institute of Technology, Howe School of Technology Management, Hoboken, NJ, USA
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Correspondence: S Huff, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand. Tel: þ 64 4 463 5819; Fax: þ 64 4 463 5446; E-mail:[email protected]
Journal of Information Technology (2007) 22, 397–398. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000118
ase studies have served as a valuable vehicle for both research and teaching within the information systems field for many years. Case studies may be divided into two main camps: cases written for research purposes, and cases used for teaching. More than anything else, what distinguishes teaching case studies from research cases is that teaching cases are generally issue-centered. That is, a good teaching case is written around one or more central issues faced by one or more specific individuals in an organization. An ‘issue’ may be a challenge, a decision, an opportunity, or even all three at once! An issue demands some kind of response or action on the part of the individual or the organization. That’s what makes a teaching case useful in a classroom setting: it challenges students to answer the question ‘what would you do here?’ As well, most teaching cases tell their story from the point of view of one or more specific individuals. They challenge a reader/student to ‘put themselves into the shoes’ of the person in the case. In this way a teaching case strives to create a believable scenario, to encourage students to ‘suspend their disbelief’, take the case and its issues seriously, and really engage in the case analysis and classroom case discussion process. By so engaging, students remember the case details and their analysis of it, and internalize the outcome of the class discussion process. Our experience using cases in teaching has been that students will frequently remember the lessons of the best cases years afterward, something most unlikely for traditional class lectures. Teaching cases have been written by many academics. In particular, largeyschools, including the Harvard Business School, Ivey School of Business, Insead, and IMD. However the large majority of such cases emerge from the caseteaching schools, notably the Harvard Business School and the Ivey School of Business. Those institutions have built into their internal reward systems, rewards for writing new cases, and most of their faculty write a number of new cases each year. Unfortunately, the rewards for faculty at other institutions for writing teaching cases are slimmer. Often, faculty write their own cases for the learning experience, or
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because they feel their teaching is enhanced as a result. Occasionally conferences such as ICIS decide to accept teaching case submissions. There
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