Evolution of a Course: Instructional Design Elements and Impacts

During the 2017 spring semester, international educators from the United States and Sweden collaborated on an Information Systems, Analysis, Design and Modeling course at the University of Business and Technology (UBT) in Kosovo for graduate students. In the spring of 2018, the collaboration and course were repeated with both graduate and undergraduate students. In the initial course, student work was focused on the conceptual design of a UBT Knowledge Center through the lenses of soft systems methodology and co- design activities. The Spring 2018 course built upon and expanded this work with additional stakeholder input from a mixed group of students from the Computer Science undergraduate and Information Systems graduate students, forming a richer and more meaningful exploration of the topic. Moving beyond the conceptual visioning activities from the 2017 course, the 2018 students were also required to analyze, design and model platforms for an institutional repository of UBT knowledge and reflect on its impact to multiple stakeholder groups at the institutional, regional and global levels. Differences between the pedagogical course design, learning outcomes, and student reflections will be explored in this paper to highlight the impact of flipped classroom teaching, cross-disciplinary/cross-degree group work and introducing soft systems thinking to students without a prior background in this methodology.