Information Management for Organizational Effectiveness Syllabus

What is INLS385-002 all about?

To quote from the UNC Catalog course descriptions, this course is about:

Basic concepts in the way that information, people, and technology interact to influence organizational effectiveness.
Principles of problem solving, teamwork, leadership, and organizational change/innovation.

But what does that mean?

What it means is that we are going to consider the ways information is used within organizations. But to do that, we will have to consider the cultures of organizations and how they behave. In the process, we will consider the role of information technology within organizations, but it won't be our primary focus.

Our primary focus will be on understanding organizations and how they think, ...

... how information flows within organizations, and how that understanding can provide us with a way to deal with innovation and change in organizational contexts.

We consider theoretical foundations for practical applications and we will look at lots of examples, perhaps some you may never have considered.

Plan to read a lot, think even more, and to share the results of your reading and thinking with your peers. We want to develop the capacity for critical thinking about information use and, in the process, begin to develop some personal problem-solving skills that may be put to good use in any organization.

Method of transmission of information

Most of the class will be a mix of lecture, question and answer, discussion, and in class activities. Plan to use your laptops to reach out for information you might want to introduce in class.

You will have multiple written assignments and a final in this class. Your written products will be submissions to the appropriate Canvas assignments space.

One limitation

No one is permitted to record any of the class sessions, either with video or audio recorders, unless you first discuss it with the instructor and receive written permission to do so.

However, if we have a Zoom session, each class Zoom session will be recorded and a link to the stored file will be made available to everyone in the class.

Special mention

In a previous semester, I asked the students to reflect on the class by suggesting a new way to approach the topic. Every one of the students took on the topic with thoughtfulness and thoroughness. This class is built upon their thinking. However, this particular semester is following, for the most part, the plan suggested by Kate Moran and Marla Sullivan. Their work inspired the spring 2013 class and its organization, and continues to inspire this semester's version of the class.

In a more recent semester, I asked Kai Ghani for his thoughts on how well the class website worked for the designated audiences. He did a thorough analysis and offered some concrete and good design recommendations, many of which have been incorporated in this site.

Additionally, much of this semester's class is influenced by the INLS385 classes taught by Dr. Mohammad Jarrahi. His voice will be heard through the organization of this particular semester's class.

readings

There are no assigned textbooks,

... but plan to read a lot, and to save many of the readings to your personal professional reading collection.

Readings will not be for memorizing things, but rather to frame your thinking for the session to come. Read them, think about them, and, where useful, comment on them in the Canvas discussions.

We will have a three level plan for readings

something about the topic of the day, easy to digest, perhaps in a visual form
something to think about, relevant to the topic under consideration
articles or book sections that are about research on the topic, research we might not talk about in class, but that might be worth your individual exploration

We will also have a daily video that may broaden our horizons.

How will we find the readings?

Readings will be made available electronically, through the class schedule and the specific session pages.

Evaluation

The several tasks for this class are each worth the following percentages

Value Added

25% of your course grade will be based upon the value you add to your colleagues' class experience. The value you add to your peers' experience in this class is based on three things:

Attendance - You are expected to attend all classes. You should be ready to start at 1100. If you need to miss a class, let me know so we can expect that you won't be with us.
Deportment - Be courteous to your classmates. Use your information tools to support current course activities only. Pay attention. Try not to pursue other interests during the class session.
General Participation - which means being prepared for class, making observations about the readings, asking questions, actively working on in-class exercises and actively listening, writing at least one forum posting every two weeks, and commenting on a colleague's forum posting at least once during the semester. Everyone will get the chance to participate.

Module Reports

50% of your course grade will come from four module reports.

We often do not realize what we have learned until after due deliberation. Writing a module report provides you an opportunity to reflect on the readings and lectures, and reading the reports you write provides me a chance to assess to what extent you have met the learning objectives.

15% of your course grade will come from a group report discussing the individual in the organization
10% of your course grade will come from a group presentation discussing organizational culture
15% of your course grade will come from a group presentation discussing organizational leadership and a personal report on your movie lessons learned
10% of your course grade will come from a personal report discussing technology effects

There will be a final exam. It will be an in-class submission of a semester

25% of your course grade wil come from the Final Exam

One of the important things we hear from employers of IS grads is that our grads have the ability to express themselves clearly and coherently in written and verbal formats. Accordingly, our evaluation tools for INLS385 are written and verbal formats.

But what kind of standard will be applied?

Subjective assessment draws upon the instructor's professionally developed awareness of quality in academic or other work. This may be essential for assessing with validity, because some outcomes require sensitivity to context and thus cannot be assessed in a fixed way across contexts. Objective assessment, in contrast, relies on quantitative scales that could apply to description of student work or performance. [IUPUI]

Therefore, grading the evaluation components for INLS385-001 is necessarily a subjective effort and a grade will generally mean the descriptors in the table below.

Your grades will be calculated using numbers for points, which will translate into letter grades according to this standard.

points	what it means	grade
94 >	Mastery of course content at the highest level of attainment that can reasonably be expected	A
90-94 87-90 84-87 80-84	A totally acceptable performance demonstrating an adequate level of attainment	A- B+ B B-
77-80 74-77 70-74 67-70 64-67 61-64	A marginal performance in the required exercises demonstrating a minimal passing level	C+ C C- D+ D D-
< 60	For whatever reasons, an unacceptable performance	F