E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Jel¸ena Zaˇsˇcerinska
University of Latvia, Jurmalas Gatve 74/76, Riga, Latvia
Andreas Ahrens
Hochschule Wismar, University of Technology, Business and Design, Philipp-M¨uller-Straße 14, 23966 Wismar, Germany
Keywords:
e-Business applications, Engineering education, Needs analysis.
Abstract:
Contemporary engineers need to become more cognizant and more responsive to the emerging needs of the
market for engineering and technology services. Engineering education has the potential to contribute deci-
sively to the sustainable development of e-business applications or enterprise 2.0, which penetrate our society
more thoroughly with the availability of broadband services. However, the success of e-business applications
in engineering education requires needs analysis to be considered. Aim of the following paper is to analyze
the student engineers’ needs in e-business applications of Web 2.0 technologies within engineering education
on the pedagogical discourse. The meaning of the key concepts of e-business applications, engineering ed-
ucation and needs analysis is studied. The study shows a potential model for development, indicating how
the steps of the process are related following a logical chain: determining e-business applications reveal-
ing e-business applications in engineering education defining needs analysis empirical study within a
multicultural environment. The results reveal that needs analysis of e-business applications in engineering
education contributes to the incorporation of business-driven topics in the curriculum of engineering science.
1 INTRODUCTION
The primary target for software as a service is busi-
nesses (Vossen, 2009) considered as an overall at-
tribute necessary for innovation-friendly societies to
transform social capital into economic growth (Eu-
ropean Union, 2008). New business ideas such as
the payment service offered by RevolutionMoney, the
mail service offered by eSnailer, the flight service of-
fered by Virgin Charter, or the personalized TV ser-
vice from Current.com are classical examples and
have found widespread acceptance in the community
(Vossen, 2009). E-business applications benefit from
Web 2.0 where the increased data exchange within the
system is no longer a limiting parameter with the cur-
rent developments in the infrastructure. Aim of the
following paper is to analyze the student engineers’
needs in e-business applications of Web 2.0 technolo-
gies within engineering education on the pedagogi-
cal discourse. The meaning of the key concepts of
e-business applications and needs analysis is studied.
Moreover, the study demonstrates how the key con-
cepts are related to the idea of engineering education
and shows a potential model for development, indi-
cating how the steps of the process are related fol-
lowing a logical chain: determining e-business appli-
cations revealing e-business applications in engi-
neering education defining needs analysis em-
pirical study within a multicultural environment. The
remaining part of this paper is organized as follows:
The introductory state-of-the-art demonstrates the au-
thors’ position on the topic of the research. Section
3 introduces e-business applications. E-business ap-
plications in engineering education are studied in sec-
tion 4. The associated results of an empirical study
are presented in section 5. Finally, some concluding
remarks are provided in section 6 followed by a short
outlook on interesting topics for further work.
2 STATE-OF-THE-ART
The modern issues of global developmental trends
emphasize ”a prime importance in sustainable devel-
opment that is to meet the needs of the present with-
out compromising the ability of future generations to
41
Zaš
ˇ
cerinska J. and Ahrens A. (2010).
E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 41-46
DOI: 10.5220/0002891500410046
Copyright
c
SciTePress
meet their own needs” (Zimmermann, 2003). Thus,
sustainable personality, and, consequently, e-business
application user, is ”a person who sees relationships
and inter-relationships between nature, society and
the economy (Rohweder, 2007). In other words, this
is a person who is able to develop the system of ex-
ternal and internal perspectives, and in turn the sys-
tem of external and internal perspectives becomes a
main condition for the sustainable e-business applica-
tion user to develop.
For instance, the concern of the European Union,
namely, to become ”the most competitive and dy-
namic knowledge-based economy in the world capa-
ble of sustainable economic growth with more and
better jobs and greater social cohesion (European
Commission, 2004), demonstrates the significance of
developing the system of external and internal per-
spectives for the developmentof humans, institutions,
society and mankind. Thus, the life necessity to de-
velop the system of two perspectives, namely, exter-
nal and internal, determines the research methodol-
ogy of e-business applications in engineering educa-
tion, as highlighted in Figure 1.
However, in real life sustainable e-business appli-
cation user is often realized from one of the perspec-
tives: from the internal perspective accentuating cog-
nition (Vossen, 2009) and from the external perspec-
tive accentuating social interaction and finding a bal-
ance between the external and internal perspectives
(Surikova, 2007).
The methodological foundation of the present re-
search on use of e-business applications of Web 2.0
in engineering education is formed by the System-
Constructivist Theory based on Parson’s system the-
ory where any activity is considered as a system,
Luhmann’s theory which emphasizes communication
as a system, the theory of symbolic interactional-
ism and the theory of subjectivism. The System-
Constructivist Theory introduced by (Luhman, 1988,
pp. 1–14) and (Parson, 1976) emphasizes that human
being’s point of view depends on the subjective as-
pect: everyone has his/her own system of external and
internal perspectives (Figure1) that is a complex open
system (Rudzinska, 2008) and experience plays the
central role in a construction process (Maslo, 2007).
3 E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
The paradigm change, namely, the move towards col-
laborative business - from person to people and from
systems to service (Jones, 2008), puts the emphasis
on the use of e-business applications of Web 2.0 tech-
nologies. Typical e-business applications of Web 2.0
techniques and technologies include corporate blogs,
wikis, feeds and podcasts (Vossen, 2009).
Blogs are seen by Vossen (Vossen, 2009) as a
common way to stay in touch with customers, to in-
form about new products and to receive immediate
feedback; they can also be used internally in order
to discuss specific topics among the staff of an enter-
prise, in particular if people are geographically dis-
tributed. Blogs allow a moderated interaction be-
tween participants, be it customers or colleagues, and
a simple and efficient distribution of announcements,
experiences, opinions, reports, or evaluations. How-
ever, bloggers need to keep in mind that blogs are
typically crawled by search engines, so that company
internals written into a blog might reach the outside
world and be presented as search results. Also, a blog
is useless without regular updates, a reasonable num-
ber of readers, continuous moderation, and good con-
tent. It is also a good idea for a company to treat in-
dependent bloggers just like regular journalists, since
they might have a considerable readership.
In order to stay up-to-date with a company blog,
but also with other information an enterprise might
publish, there are essentially two approaches: pull
and push. The active or pull way is to read the in-
formation at my own liberty and pace; in the passive
or push approach, the information will be delivered
to me automatically. Indeed, blog entries and other
sources can be subscribed via feeds that are based on
protocols such as RSS or Atom (Johnson, 2006), and
they can be read usinga feed readersuch as Bloglines,
Google Reader, Newsgator, or NewsAlloy (or simply
in the browser). A podcast is determined by Vossen
(Vossen, 2009) as a particular form of feed consisting
of audio or video material. Wikis allow collabora-
tive work on a common set of documents by many
authors, and have been discovered as a new way of
performing knowledge management in a learning or-
ganization. If staff members can be motivated to par-
ticipate in the development of a wiki, this can be con-
sidered as a good example of making implicit knowl-
edge explicit, thereby attacking the core problem of
knowledge management.
A social network can also act as a means of con-
necting employees of distinct expertise across depart-
ments and company branches and help them build
profiles in an easy way, and it can do so in a much
cheaper and more flexible way than traditional knowl-
edge management systems. Once a profile has been
set up and published within the network, others can
search for people with particular knowledge or exper-
tise and connect to them. If the social network is to be
run outside an enterprise, providers like Ning allow
an easy setup of a self-regulated and self-managed
ICE-B 2010 - International Conference on e-Business
42
• conscious
• learning
• unconscious
object generalization
External Perspectives
asaLifeNecessity
synthesis
thesystemof
interacting
phenomena
synthesis
Internal Perspectives
asaLifeNecessity
• foreign language
• thought generalization
• fromabstract
toconcrete
• systematic
• acquisition
• mother tongue
• fromconcreteto
abstract
• non-systematic
Figure 1: Developing the system of external and internal perspectives as a life necessity.
community. Vossen (Vossen, 2009) summarizes that
a broad usage of Web 2.0 techniques and tools within
an enterprise, paired with an increased exploitation of
services offered over the Web and with leaving more
room for the individual and its preferences, has led
to the term ”enterprise 2.0. In other words, enter-
prises as well as software vendors are exploiting it
by integrating Web 2.0 features into their software,
processes, and work environments. Hence, e-business
applications of Web 2.0 technologies, namely, corpo-
rate blogs, wikis, feeds and podcasts, are seen as an
integral part of engineering education.
4 E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN
ENGINEERING EDUCATION
The change in engineer entering the service area,
namely, not working permanently at a large-scale en-
terprise but accepting project-related orders of large-
scale enterprises by free engineers’ office (Bassus
and Wolfgramm, 2009) reveals the significance of e-
business applications of Web 2.0 technologies to be
integrated into the processes and environments of en-
gineering education.
A proper integration of e-business applications
into engineering education is provided by needs
analysis. However, the emphasis of the System-
Constructivist Theory on the subjective aspect of hu-
man being’s point of view and experience that plays
the central role in a construction process does not al-
low analyzing the student engineer needs objectively:
human beings do not always realize their experience
and their wants (Maslo, 2007).
In accordance with the research methodology,
namely, developing the system of the external and in-
ternal perspectives, needs analysis is revealed to be
of three levels, namely, individual, organizational and
professional needs, in engineering education. More-
over, needs analysis includes four domains, namely,
student’s needs, wants, lacks and expectations, to an-
alyze (Karapetjana, 2008). Thus, needs analysis has
the potential to contribute decisively to the sustain-
able incorporation of e-business applications of Web
2.0 technologies or enterprise 2.0 into engineering ed-
ucation.
5 EMPIRICAL RESULTS
The target population of the present empirical study
involves 22 participants of Fifth Baltic Summer
School Technical Informatics and Information Tech-
nology at the Institute of Computer Science of the
Tartu University, August 7-22, 2009, Tartu, Estonia
and 40 students at the Department of Electrical Engi-
neering and Computer Science of the Faculty of Engi-
neering of Wismar University, University of Technol-
ogy, Business and Design. All 22 participants of Fifth
Baltic Summer School Technical Informatics and In-
formation Technology have got Bachelor or Master
Degree in different fields of Computer Sciences and
working experience in different fields. The Interna-
tional Summer School offers special courses to sup-
port the internationalization of education and the co-
operation among the universities of the Baltic Sea Re-
gion. The aims of the Baltic Summer Schools Tech-
nical Informatics and Information Technology are de-
termined as preparation for international Master and
Ph.D. programs in Germany, further specialization
in computer science and information technology and
learning in a simulated environment. The Summer
School Technical Informatics and Information Tech-
E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
43
nology contains a special module on Web 2.0 where
e-business applications are an integral part.
Finally, 40 students at the Department of Elec-
trical Engineering and Computer Science at the Fac-
ulty of Engineering of Wismar University, University
of Technology, Business and Design were taken into
considerationat the beginningof the seventh semester
in the fourth year of their bachelor studies. The stu-
dents have not got any or few work experience. The
seventh semester of the Bachelor’s program for Elec-
trical Engineering and Computer Science at the Fac-
ulty of Engineering of Wismar University does not
contain a specialmoduleon Web 2.0 where e-business
applications are an integral part.
Analysis of the use of Web 2.0 is based on needs
analysis as a basis for designing (Surikova, 2007) the
following questionnaire:
- Question 1: Do you know the word Web 2.0?
- Question 2: Do you know the basic idea of Web
2.0?
- Question 3: Have you already used Web 2.0,
namely, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc?
- Question 4: Do you think Web 2.0 requires a lot of
profound knowledge, namely, math, physics, etc?
- Question 5: Do you think Web 2.0 is useful for
your individual needs?
- Question 6: Do you think Web 2.0 is useful for
your organizational use?
- Question 7: Do you think Web 2.0 is useful for
your professional use?
The evaluation scale of ve levels for each question
is given where ”1” means ”disagree” and low level of
experience in use of e-business applications of Web
2.0 technologies and ”5” points out ”agree” and high
level of use of Web 2.0. The participants’ use of Web
2.0 was evaluated by the participants themselves on
the first day of the Baltic Summer School, namely,
August 7, 2009, and by the student engineers them-
selves at the beginning of the seventh semester in the
fourth year of bachelor studies, namely, September
2009.
The analysis of the survey (Figure 2) reveals the
following: the use of Web 2.0 by the Baltic Sum-
mer School (BaSoTi) participants is heterogeneous
and the participants consider Web 2.0 to be most use-
ful for their individual needs. The analysis of the sur-
vey (Figure 3) in September 2009 emphasizes that the
university students use of Web 2.0 is heterogeneous
as well as the students don’t know the possibilities of-
fered by Web 2.0 properly. Then, the comparison of
the survey results of the BaSoTi participants and the
university students reveals the following:
1 2 3 4 5
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
overall mark
pdf
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Question 6
Question 7
Figure 2: PDF (probability density function) of the BaSoTi
participants’ evaluation on August 7th, 2009.
1 2 3 4 5
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
overall mark
pdf
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Question 6
Question 7
Figure 3: PDF (probability density function) of the univer-
sity students’ evaluation in September 2009.
- Question 1: The word Web 2.0 to a wider ex-
tent is known by the BaSoTi participants thereby
developing the internal perspective that can be
explained by a higher level of their education,
namely, obtained Bachelor or Master Degree in
different fields of Computer Sciences.
- Question 2: The basic idea of Web 2.0 to a higher
degree is obtained by the BaSoTi participants as
well thereby developing the internal perspective,
that can be also revealed by a higher level of their
education, namely, obtained Bachelor or Master
Degree in different fields of Computer Sciences,
and their participation in international projects,
for example, Baltic Summer School Technical In-
formatics and Information Technology.
- Question 3: A widerexperiencein use of Web 2.0,
namely, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, is stressed
by the BaSoTi participants that can be meant by
the fact that the BaSoTi participants mostly come
from the Baltic states where English is an interna-
ICE-B 2010 - International Conference on e-Business
44
tional means of communication whereas the uni-
versity students use German that is already an in-
ternational language thereby finding a balance be-
tween the external and internal perspectives.
- Question 4: Both groups, namely, the BaSoTi par-
ticipants and the university students, consider that
Web 2.0 does not require a lot of profound knowl-
edge in math and physics, thereby developing the
internal perspective that emphasizes the role of
both groups as users and not as Web 2.0 designers.
- Question 5: The use of Web 2.0 for the individ-
ual needs is emphasized by the BaSoTi partici-
pants thereby developing the internal perspective
that can be meant by the educational peculiarities,
namely, the use of Web 2.0 in educational systems
of the Baltic States.
- Question 6: The use of Web 2.0 for the orga-
nizational purposes is considered by the BaSoTi
as well as university students, thereby finding the
balance between the externaland internal perspec-
tives explained by the increased use of Web 2.0 in
the educational system.
- Question 7: The use of Web 2.0 for the profes-
sional use is outlined by the BaSoTi participants
thereby developing the system of the external and
internal perspectives that can be also revealed by
a higher level of their education, namely, obtained
Bachelor or Master Degree in different fields of
Computer Sciences, and their participation in in-
ternational projects, for example, Baltic Sum-
mer School Technical Informatics and Informa-
tion Technology.
Hence, the use of Web 2.0 and, consequently, e-
business applications by the BaSoTi participants is
provided by the knowledge the participants obtained
in Bachelor or Master studies in different fields of
Computer Sciences and by their working experience
in different fields thereby putting the emphasis on de-
veloping the internal perspective while the use of Web
2.0 by the university students is regarded as finding
the balance between the external and internal perspec-
tives.
Due to the educational differences, namely, Web
2.0 module volume and content, between the Baltic
Summer Schools Technical Informatics and Informa-
tion Technology and the Bachelor’s program for Elec-
trical Engineering and Computer Science at the Fac-
ulty of Engineering of Wismar University in the sev-
enth semester, Survey 2 of use of e-business applica-
tions of Web 2.0 technologies by only the Baltic Sum-
mer School participantswas carried out on August 11,
2009.
Between Survey 1 and 2 of the participants’
1 2 3 4 5
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
overall mark
pdf
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Question 6
Question 7
Figure 4: PDF (probability density function) of the second
BaSoTi participants’ evaluation on August 11th, 2009.
experience in use of e-business applications teach-
ing/learningactivity involved courses in TechnicalIn-
formatics and Information Technology (German and
English), preconference tutorials for introduction into
advanced research topics, attendance of conference
Advanced Topics in Telecommunication, tutorials and
practical tasks, language training for talk and presen-
tation (optional in English or German), leisure activ-
ities and social contacts, practical work at IT Com-
pany. Then, the analysis of the second survey (Fig-
ure 4) reveals that the participants’ experience in use
of e-business applications has become homogeneous
and the participants have put the emphasis on use of
Web 2.0 where e-business applications are an integral
part for professional needs.
After having implemented a variety of methods
and forms of teaching/learning activity (Zsˇcerinska,
2009) the result summary of two surveys of the partic-
ipants’ experience within the Baltic Summer School
2009 demonstrates the positive changes in compari-
son with Survey 1: the level of the participants’ expe-
rience in terms of use of Web 2.0 has been enriched,
the level of the participants’ experience in terms of
knowledge of basic idea of Web 2.0 has been im-
proved, the level of the participants’ experience in
terms of use of Web 2.0 for individual needs de-
creased, thereby developing the system of the external
and internal perspectives and the level of the partici-
pants’ experience in terms of use of Web 2.0 for orga-
nizational and professional needs increased, thereby
developingthe system of the externaland internal per-
spectives. Thus, the results’ comparison of Survey 1
and Survey 2 of the participants’ experience in use
of e-business applications emphasizes the decrease of
the participants’ number who have obtained the low
and critical level of experience and the increase of the
participants’ number who have achieved the average
E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
45
and optimal level of experiencerevealed by the signif-
icance in difference between the levels of the partici-
pants’ experience in use of e-business applications.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The results reveal that needs analysis of e-business
applications in engineering education contributes to
the incorporation of business-driven topics in the cur-
riculum of engineering science, thereby developing
the system of the external and internal perspectives.
The recommendation here is the role of teachers
as mentors for participants’ self-discovery and self-
realization; to motivate participants, to stimulate their
interests, to help them to develop their own structure
and style, as well as to help them to evaluate their
performance and be able to apply these findings to
improve (Maslo, 2007) their further use of e-business
applications in engineering education.
Further research on needs analysis of e-business
applications in engineering education is considered
to include needs analysis, the questionnaire develop-
ment, carrying out empirical studies and statistical
analysis.
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