Three-dimensional Pedagogy for Business It Education

Information technology (IT) is developing at a blistering pace and the pedagogical methods used to teach it are evolving as well. There have been many developments in academia to accommodate the growing reliance on IT. Distance learning and web-based instruction are the latest attempts to meld traditional methods with the new methods emerging today. This subject is of great concern not only because of the natural evolution of IT, but because the demography of the college student has also changed. In this paper, we examine a novel approach used to teach IT to graduate business students at Florida A&M University's School of Business and Industry (SBI). Since business managers and CEOs are expected to possess the analytical abilities to confront a rapidly changing business cycle, the authors developed a capstone course designed to meet these concerns. In this course, we found that a "three-dimensional pedagogy" helped the advanced student enhance a broader set of critical competencies. The pedagogical model consists of three integrated silos: technical, applied and policy. This combines a variety of interactive techniques to create a "value-added" student with enhanced metaskills for business management. Our method resembles the "value chain" concept and is designed to create a dynamic learning environment to prevent the rapid obsolescence of acquired competencies. The focus of this paper is to (1) introduce the course, (2) explain the three-dimensional pedagogy model, (3) present an overview of its objectives and (4) provide a synopsis of our findings.