Introducing Information Systems Approach for Acquiring IT Competence Needed For Business Applications

This article reports the findings of Information Systems Approach (ISA) and commonly used Traditional Approach (TA) on the acquisition of IT (Information Technology) competence of undergraduate students taking an introductory IT course in a business college. The ISA begins with the conceptual understanding of business activities followed by the introduction of databases, spreadsheets and the word-processing in line with the IT applications in business activities. While the Traditional Approach (TA) begins with conceptual understanding of business activities like the ISA, but followed by IT modules in sequence of word-processing, spreadsheets and then databases. Several groups were randomly selected from the same pool of students and introduced ISA and the TA for the acquisition of IT competence. The results indicated that the ISA group is more effective in enhancing IT competence in comparison to the TA group. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT] Keywords: IT, IT competence; IT skills; Approaches for delivering IT skills; IT modules, Word-processing (WP), Spreadsheets (SS) and Databases (DB)