Project

The BIPER project aims to foster a collaborative partnership in order to develop a blended-learning compatible BIS curriculum based on shared values, eLearning experiences, and sound pedagogical principles. While eLearning has been around for over two decades now, the recent global challenge invoked by the COVID-19 pandemic has put online education into the forefront of academic attention – both as a technological opportunity to maintain the continuity of teaching (at all levels of education) and as a challenge to innovate and apply new methodological approaches.

The current pandemic put extra strain and challenge on most universities to retain the quality of their education. It has become clear that innovative approaches are needed – and needed fast: approaches that can help to deliver high-quality education in distance learning format in areas traditionally not well suited for digital training. The challenge concerns not only teaching methods and material but also the teachers and trainers themselves.

The academic field of Business Information Systems is a complex area bridging business and organisational topics with questions of applied information technology. Teaching such a multidisciplinary domain which assumes not only knowledge of theoretical concepts and technical skills to use tools but also a problem centred mindset and related problem-solving abilities is a challenge in itself. However, with the heightened need for high-quality online education (offering both distance or blended learning options in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic) educators of this area face increased difficulties to find appropriate methods and create new content and teaching material. Sharing ideas and experiences regarding what worked and what was less successful could enhance our knowledge of BIS distance education.

BIS education in a classroom context may be characterised by what the literature calls ‘active learning’, which refers to pedagogies that increase and enhance student interaction. This is required by the project-oriented and teamwork-based reality of developing, implementing, and managing IT/IS solutions in an organizational context. Beyond the obvious basics of the trade, interpersonal skills, team building and the ability to combine individual efforts with group work are an essential part of training BIS professionals. While video and audio solutions are usually augmented with less synchronous means such as text messages or sharing files, this still does not make up for lost personal proximity. Using document sharing options and working on the same file together raises new challenges just as much as offering new opportunities. To be successful in this setting of increased complexity and expectations lecturers could use any help they could get – let it be experiences, best practices, successful methodologies, or even ready-made materials.

Methodological innovations are needed that can deliver soft skills along with best practices for teaching and learning such skills. This implies digital education that goes beyond the simple demonstration of how to use some software tools but instead could allow the transfer of complex skills and capabilities required by developing and managing modern computer and data systems. Sharing best practices and experiences between institutions of differing cultures is essential in this regard. Furthermore, new methods, methodologies, and techniques need to be explored as well – solutions that could be used both in a fully online setting and could be successful in the context of hybrid and mixed approach educational settings too.

The planned project aims at allowing consortiums partners to share their knowledge and expertise concerning the above situation and develop a shared pool of resources benefiting both its members as well as the wider BIS education community.

Members of this consortium intend to re-think and re-design BIS curriculum not only under the threats of COVID-19, but on a longer term with the following objectives:

– Partners of the BIPER project had organized a Workshop at the 24th annual International Conference on Business Information Systems (BisConf) titled “BIS Education: Trends and Challenges” (BisEd 2021). Project members had submitted and presented four papers at the workshop (for details see the ‘Publications’). The workshop was held in online form and had over 30 participants during the afternoon of Monday, 14 June 2021 using the WebEx meeting tool.

– University of Maribor had organized a Panel discussion at the 34th annual Bled eConference titled “Democratizing Learning: Re-imagined Through A New ‘Blend’ in 3D and VR“. The panel had five discussants and more than 25 conference participants in the audience during the morning of Tuesday, June 29, 2021 using MS Teams.

– Prof Keshav Dahal from BIPER organised and chaired a special session “Interoperability of IoT and CPS for industrial collaborative networks” during the 22ND IFIP/SOCOLNET WORKING CONFERENCE ON VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES (PRO-VE 2021) and disseminated BIPER activities.

– The eDoer platform was presented by BIPER partner TIB’s Gábor Kismihók at the Online Educa 2021 Conference in Berlin. Friday, Dec 3, 12:00–13:15, Room Tiergarten, Session: All In on OER – Title: OER Recommendation System to Support Goal-Driven Learning. The slides are here.

– Two researchers working on the BIPER Erasmus+ project, Csaba Csáki and András Gábor has submitted a proposal titled “Problem-based Learning Approach for the Curriculum Design of a Hybrid Business Information Systems Education” to the European University Association’s annual Learning & Teaching Forum (in 2022 the theme was: ‘On site, online, on point?’). After reviews and updates, the paper was accepted, in fact, the proposal had been selected as the main presentation of Session P2 on “Designing fit-for-purpose curricula and assessment methods”, which has also featured three more, but shorter ‘practitioner’ insights. This main paper had 22 minutes for presentation followed by a 15 minutes long question-and-answer period, where an interesting discussion developed over five question asked by teachers from the audience. The presentation by the two Corvinus professors was thus well received with close to 80 people attending their session online. The conference in 2022 had close to 260 participants from dozens of Universities from Europe, who could attend 6 sessions over two days. There was a ‘peer groups’ day organized right before the two-days main event.

– The BIPER project, with the lead of University of Maribor and Claranet is organizing a Summer School for Business Information students based on new approaches and content developed by project participants. The Summer School – titled “Smart City Enterprise Architectures Virtual Reality Summer School” – will take place 20-24 June 2022 online using the Frames VR environment. The course focuses on a TOGAF-based approach to Smart City development using a case study of security issues and is free of charge for accepted students. More information may be found under “Summer School” of the BIPER project page (see below), while application details are here.

– University of Maribor will be again organizing the annual Bled Conference – with the 35th instalment running under the title “Digital Restructuring and Human (Re)Action”. University of West Scotland will organize a Panel discussion at the conference to discuss BIS teaching methods and tools. The conference will be held, 26-29 June 2022 – now hopefully onsite.

Representatives of the BIPER project meet every two weeks to discuss project progress and deliverables. These meetings are usually held Wednesdays at 2pm CE(S)T. In the year 2021 the team had completed 18 meetings (see Results for more details).

The Project Management Board of the BIPER Project meets every three months to discuss progress, issues, risk, and Quality Assurance related action items. During 2021 the PMB met 5 times including a preliminary meeting before the start of the project after the acceptance of the grant proposal had been announced.

The project had four transnational meetings proposed in the original application (kick-off at the end of March 2021 in Budapest at CUB; September 2021 Glasgow at UWS; March 2022 in Milan; and the closing meeting in August 2022 in Maribor at UM). However, due to the COVID pandemic, so far no transnational meeting could take place.

Update (March 2022): Now, that COVID restrictions have been mostly lifted, the rescheduled 2022 Transnational program is as follows:
               11-12 May, Budapest (eDoer discussion and content);
               26-27 May, Bergamo, Italy (WP3 deliverables and summer school preparation);
               28-29 June, Bled, Slovenia (WP3 closing, WP4 deliverables);
               18-19 August, Glasgow, Scotia (WP4 and IO3 closing, end of project). One of the recent meetings of the BIPER project team on 23 March 2022 was held online using a VR environment provided by Frame.io: