Factors that Influence e-Business Application in Tertiary Education
Andreas Ahrens
1
, Sebastian Aust
1
and Jeļena Zaščerinska
2
1
Hochschule Wismar, University of Technology, Business and Design, Philipp-Müller-Straße 14, 23966 Wismar, Germany
2
Centre for Education and Innovation Research, Kurzemes prospekts 114-102, Riga LV-1069, Latvia
Keywords: e-Business Application, Tertiary Education, External Factors, Internal Factors.
Abstract: e-Business has dramatically influenced progress in all the dimensions of modern life in the context of
globalisation. Education is one of these dimensions. Moreover, e-Business and tertiary education are
interdependent. However, success in application of e-Business technologies in tertiary education can be
changed by its factors. Aim of the present paper is to analyze factors that influence e-Business application in
tertiary education. The meaning of the key concepts of e-business technologies and factors is studied.
Moreover, the study demonstrates how the key concepts are related to the idea of tertiary education and
shows a potential model for development, indicating how the steps of the process are related following a
logical chain: e-business technologies → the role of e-business application in tertiary education → factors
→ empirical study within a multicultural environment. The results of the present research show that the
external factors and, particularly, factors forming communication influence e-business application in tertiary
education. Directions of further research are proposed.
1 INTRODUCTION
E-Business advances the development of innovative
products, processes and services in the economy:
just-in-time service delivery, inventory visibility and
up-to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities.
Success of e-Business depends on e-Business
proper integration into the processes and
environments of tertiary education. However,
application of e-Business technologies in tertiary
education can be changed by its factors.
Aim of the present paper is to analyze factors
that influence e-Business application in tertiary
education.
The remaining part of this paper is organized as
follows: The introductory state-of-the-art section
demonstrates the authors’ position on the topic of
the research. Section 3 introduces e-business
technologies as well as the role of e-Business
application in tertiary education. Factors are defined
in Section 4. The associated results of an empirical
study will be 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 methodological approach of the present research
is determined as the development of the system of
external and internal perspectives. Whereas the
external perspective accentuates social interaction of
development, the internal perspective focuses on
cognitive activity (Surikova, 2007). Development of
the system of external and internal perspectives
proceeds from the external perspective through the
phase of unity of external and internal perspectives
(the system of interacting phenomena) to the internal
perspective as depicted in Figure 1.
Development of the system of external and internal
perspectives is formed by the System-Constructivist
Theory. The application of this approach to learning
introduced by Reich (Reich, 2005) emphasizes that
human being’s point of view depends on the
subjective aspect (Maslo, 2007): everyone has his/her
own system of external and internal perspectives that
is a complex open system (Ahrens and Zaščerinska,
2010), and experience plays the central role in the
knowledge construction process (Maslo, 2007).
341
Ahrens A., Aust S. and Zaš
ˇ
cerinska J..
Factors that Influence e-Business Application in Tertiary Education.
DOI: 10.5220/0004014803410344
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Communication Networking, e-Business and Optical Communication Systems (ICE-B-2012),
pages 341-344
ISBN: 978-989-8565-23-5
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
Figure 1: Phases of development of the system of external
and internal perspectives.
3 E-BUSINESS TECHNOLOGIES
Typical e-business applications include corporate
blogs, wikis, feeds and podcasts (Vossen, 2009) as
shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Elements of e-business applications.
Blogs are a common way to stay in touch with
customers, to inform about new products and to
receive immediate feedback; they can also be used
internally to discuss specific topics among the staff
of an enterprise, in particular if people are
geographically distributed (Vossen, 2009). 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 information at
my own liberty and pace; in the passive or push
approach, the information will be delivered to me
automatically.
A podcast is a particular form of a feed
consisting of audio or video material (Vossen,
2009). Wikis allow collaborative 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 organization (Vossen,
2009).
A social network can also act as a means of
connecting employees of distinct expertise across
departments and company branches and help them to
build profiles in an easy way, and it can do so in a
much cheaper and more flexible way than traditional
knowledge management systems (Vossen, 2009).
Development of students’ competences requires
e-business application in tertiary education to be
promoted. However, e-business application in
tertiary education is formed by factors.
4 FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE
E-BUSINESS APPLICATION
Factor is a reason of the research subject change
(Lasmanis, 1997). Factors are differentiated into
external and internal. External factors in pedagogy
are surroundings and resources. Internal factors in
pedagogy are aims of the student’s activity,
motivation, interest, skills and experience.
External factors in pedagogy include factors that
form communication and educator’s purposeful
activity, and internal factors comprise learning
factors (Ahrens et al., 2011) as shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Factors that influence e-business application in
tertiary studies.
Factors that influence
e-business application in tertiary studies
External Perspective
Internal Perspective
factors forming
communication:
- aural medium
- socio-cultural
factors
- non-verbal
communication
system
educator’s
purposeful
activity
learning factors:
- age of students
- affective
factors
- motivation
- learning
experience
Factors that influence communication involve aural
medium, socio-cultural factors and non-verbal
communication system (Shumin, 1997).
Educator’s teaching activity demands on careful
preparation of material, clarification of the task
before undertaking it, planning the activity,
negotiating a balance between task needs and
individual or group needs, planning varied types of
activities, competition as a stimulus, scoring the
activity results to help the learners to be aware of
their progress and ensuring sensitivity to any
emotional or cultural blockages which might
interfere with the learners' confidence to use the
ICE-B 2012 - International Conference on e-Business
342
knowledge in relation to the particular topic,
situation or functional purpose (Kramiņa, 2000).
Finally, learning factors include the age of
students, affective factors, namely, emotions, self-
esteem, empathy, anxiety, attitude, motivation, and
learning experience (Shumin, 1997).
5 EMPIRICAL RESULTS
The research questions are as follows: which of
three groups of factors (factors forming
communication, educator’s purposeful activity and
learning factors) and how influence e-business
application in tertiary education? Hence, the
research is aimed at analyzing factors that influence
e-business application in tertiary education.
Interpretative research paradigm has been
determined.
The qualitatively oriented research used in the
present empirical study allows the construction of
only few cases (Mayring, 2007). Moreover, the
cases themselves are not of interest, only the
conclusions and transfers that are drawn from this
material (Mayring, 2007).
Selecting the cases for the case study comprises
use of information-oriented sampling, as opposed to
random sampling (Flyvbjerg, 2006). This is because
an average case is often not the richest in
information. In addition, it is often more important
to clarify the deeper causes behind a given problem
and its consequences than to describe the symptoms
of the problem and how frequently they occur
(Flyvbjerg, 2006).
The present empirical study was conducted
during the implementation of the Digital Social
Media module within the Seventh Baltic Summer
School Technical Informatics and Information
Technology in Riga Technical University, Riga,
Latvia, August 12-27, 2011. The sample involved 25
respondents.
All 25 respondents have got Bachelor or Master
Degree in different fields of computer sciences and
working experience in different fields. The
respondents are from different countries, namely,
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Great Britain,
China, India, Nigeria, Romania and Mexico. Hence,
the sample is multicultural. Whereas cultural
similarity aids mutual understanding between people
(Robbins, 2007), the students’ different cultural and
educational backgrounds contribute to successful
learning.
The Baltic Summer School contains a special
module on Digital Social Media. The main aim of
the Digital Social Media module is to actively
involve the student engineers in e-business
application by providing innovative opportunities
and organizing student engineers’ cognitive activity.
The content of the Digital Social Media module
examines the advantages and problems of this
technology, namely, architecture and management,
protocol design and programming, which makes new
social communication forms possible. The Digital
Social Media module does not reveal the concept of
e-business technologies. However, the Digital Social
Media module comprises e-business technologies,
namely, online networks.
The qualitative evaluation research comprised
the analysis of the students’ self-evaluation. The
structured interviews included three questions: 1.
What is your attitude to the Digital Social Media
module? 2. What have you learned within the
module? 3. How can you apply this knowledge in
your professional field? The aim of the interviews
was to reveal the students’ evaluation of the
implementation of the Digital Social Media module.
The students’ expressions from the structured
interviews were systematized according to eight
constructs: four constructs of external factors and
four constructs of internal factors, namely, factors
that form communication include aural medium,
socio-cultural factors and non-verbal communication
system, educator’s purposeful activity and learning
factors comprise age of students, affective factors,
motivation and learning experience.
The data were processed applying AQUAD 6.0
software. The determined codes were systematized
into meta-codes corresponding to a dimension of the
factor, namely, external and internal factor. It was
discovered that not all meta-codes and codes could
be traced in the students’ structured interviews, for
example, time for the Digital Social Media module
limited. Moreover, the students’ expressions in the
structured interviews could not be systematized
according to the following codes: socio-cultural
factors and motivation.
Most of the students’ expressions are categorized
as to the meta-code Factors forming communication,
namely, aural medium, whereas the students
participated in the whole Digital Social Media
module.
Frequencies were determined to reveal the
factors the students had mentioned most frequently.
The survey showed that the students had paid their
attention to the external factors most frequently as
demonstrated in Table 2.
For example, a student emphasized the positive
evaluation of communication in the Digital Social
Factors that Influence e-Business Application in Tertiary Education
343
Media module, thereby developing the system of
external and internal perspectives: “The Digital
Social Media module was interesting, with many
discussions between the participants. We had a good
experience. I think communication is one of the
most important and dynamic activities in the Digital
Social Media module. It is very useful to develop
this skill”. As a result the student enriched his
communication skills: “I had some improvements of
my communication skills”.
Table 2: Factors of students’ frequent positive evaluation.
Factor
Number
Percentage
Factors
forming
communication
15
60%
20
80%
18
72%
Educator’s
purposeful
activity
14
56%
Learning
factors
3
12%
5
20%
7
28%
10
40%
Structuring content analysis (Mayring, 2004) of
the data reveals that the external factors and,
particularly, factors forming communication
positively influenced e-business application within
the Digital Social Media module.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The results of the present research demonstrate that
the external factors and, particularly, factors forming
communication influence e-business application in
tertiary education. The present research has
limitations: the inter-connections between factors
and e-business application, and the empirical study
conducted by involving the students of one tertiary
institution.
Further research proposes to search for relevant
methods for evaluation of factors that influence e-
business application. Empirical studies on factors
that influence e-business application in other tertiary
institutions and a comparative research of different
countries are proposed.
REFERENCES
Ahrens, A., Zaščerinska, J. (2010). Social Dimension of
Web 2.0 in Student Teacher Professional
Development. In Europe Spring Conference 2010:
Teacher of the 21st Century: Quality Education for
Quality Teaching, 7-8 May 2010, pp. 179-186. Riga,
Latvia.
Ahrens, A., Zaščerinska, J., Bassus, O. (2011).
Collaboration within Social Dimension of Computing:
Theoretical Background, Empirical Findings, Practical
Developments. In Cruz-Cunha, M. M.; Moreira, F.
(Eds), Handbook of Research on Mobility and
Computing: Evolving Technologies and Ubiquitous
Impacts, pp. 760-773. IGI Global.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five Misunderstandings About
Case-Study Research. In Qualitative Inquiry, Volume
12, Number 2, pp. 219-245, Sage Publications.
Kramiņa, I. (2000). Linguo – Didactic Theories
Underlying Multi – Purpose Language Acquisition.
Monograph. Riga: University of Latvia, Latvia.
Lasmanis, A. (1997). System Approach in Acquiring the
Computer Use Skills. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation. University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia.
Maslo, E. (2007). Transformative Learning Space for Life-
Long Foreign Languages Learning. In International
Nordic-Baltic Region Conference of FIPLV
Innovations in Language Teaching and Learning in
the Multicultural Context, pp. 38-46, Rīga: SIA
"Izglītības soļi".
Mayring, P. (2004). Qualitative Content Analysis. In
Flick, U.; von Kardoff, E.; Steinke, I. (Eds), A
Companion to Qualitative Research, pp. 266-269.
SAGE, UK, Glasgow.
Mayring, P. (2007). On Generalization in Qualitatively
Oriented Research. In Forum Qualitative
Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research,
8(3), Art. 26, p. 8.
Reich, K. 2005. Systemisch-konstruktivistische Pädagogik.
Beltz, Weinheim.
Robbins, D. (2007). Vygotsky’s and Leontiev’s Non-
classical Psychology related to second Language
Acquisition. In International Nordic-Baltic Region
Conference of FIPLV Innovations in Language
Teaching and Learning in the Multicultural Context,
pp. 47-57, Rīga: SIA "Izglītības soļi".
Shumin, K. (1997). Factors to consider. Developing Adult
EFL Student's Speaking Abilities. English Teaching
Forum, pp. 6-15, vol. 35, No. 3.
Surikova, S. (2007). Development of Criteria, Indicators
and Level System for Evaluation of Enhancement of
Primary School Students’ Social Competence. In
Society. Integration. Education. International
Scientific Conference Proceedings, pp. 383-393,
Rezekne, Latvia.
Vossen, G. (2009). Web 2.0: a Buzzword, a serious
Development, just Fun, or What? In International
Conference on e-Business, pp. IS33-IS40, Milan, Italy.
ICE-B 2012 - International Conference on e-Business
344