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ABSTRACT
No-code / low-code app development is transforming traditional information system development paradigms. This paper presents a pedagogical design and teaching method for no-code business app development. The contents of the teaching module include vital concepts of business app development and assignments for students. The teaching module can be customized and demands a portion of a one-credit-hour workload, embeddable in a three-credit-hour IS course. Suitable courses include introductory computer programming courses, web application development courses, or e-commerce courses. A preliminary assessment of student learning resulted in positive outcomes for this module of instruction.
Keywords: Application development, Mobile computing, Programming, System development tools & methods
1.INTRODUCTION
The information systems (IS) education area is developing new IS topics or new IS courses to meet the job market (Topi et al., 2010; Mills, Chudoba, and Olsen, 2016; Babb, Waguespack, and Abdullat, 2019; Topi 2019). After years of development of large-scale, enterprise IS in business organizations, such as ERP, CRM, and SCM systems, app development has become mainstream in the software development sector (IBISWorld, 2019; Statista, 2019). An app is a small-scale computer program or software application designed to run on mobile or desktop devices. Apps are widely used for personal productivity assistance, games, and e-commerce. The IS education literature about apps has reported the use of apps for effective mobile education and mobile game app development to improve student engagement (Dekhane, Xu, and Tsoi, 2013; Yan et al., 2014), but has few reports about how an IS program can teach business app development to help IS students enhance technical skills as well as expand the knowledge set of IS development. On the technical side, no-code / low-code app development is transforming traditional information system development paradigms and has become a highly regarded paradigm in many leading organizations (Chang and Ko, 2017; Fryling, 2019).
Because of the wide-ranging IS subjects and a restricted number of courses in an IS program, an independent business app development course seems to be infeasible and unnecessary. Hence, an instructional improvement must be considered to include a teaching module of business app development that can be embedded and integrated into an appropriate IS course. This paper proposes a teaching module of no-code business app development for IS students and describes the pedagogical design...