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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

COLLEGE—E-Comm + 3Rs = The Latest Thing

Dot-coms are dying at the rate of 12 a week. The Nasdaq is in free fall. You might expect events like these to empty out college classrooms that once housed e-commerce courses. Think again. Not only do students continue to enroll in these programs, colleges continue to add such courses to the curricula. Electronic commerce, offered only at two U.S. schools just two years ago, has become a standard part of the MBA curriculum at more than 50 colleges and universities. And this fall, Woodbury University in Burbank will begin offering an undergraduate major and an MBA emphasis in e-commerce. The private university with an enrollment of 1,400 has already begun to receive interest from current business students who want to switch to the new major. “My observation as a business person and an academician is the need for e-commerce (training) is as strong as ever,” said Richard King, dean of the school of business and management at Woodbury University. “When we talk about e-commerce we’re talking about the application of information technology to business, and that’s the way business is going.” Once synonymous with dot-coms, e-commerce, at least as viewed by many of the schools preaching the doctrine, has taken on a broader meaning the application of information technology to everything from decision-making to supply-chain management. While the revised definition has given legs to many of these programs, it has also set academics to work revamping programs to better reflect the realities of the marketplace. “The programs have evolved,” said Dan LeClair, director of knowledge services for the International Association for Management Education, an accrediting organization for college and university level programs in business administration and accounting. “One of the things that (early adapters) learned is it was only an introductory phase. So even now the programs introduced three years ago look different than they did when they were first introduced.” Three years ago only two colleges offered E-commerce courses, often geared to what, at the time, appeared to be a burgeoning future for sales and marketing conducted over the Internet. Schools wanted to reflect what many saw as a fundamental change in the way products would be sold and, with rags-to-riches stories of Internet entrepreneurs abounding, many saw e-commerce programs as a way to attract the best and brightest students. Since then, the number of schools offering e-commerce courses has grown considerably. About 15 of the International Association for Management Education’s member schools offer some e-commerce coursework at the undergraduate level; another 48 offer e-commerce classes in their MBA programs. Offerings range from a single e-commerce class to degree programs in e-business or business technology. Some schools even offer a sub-emphasis in subjects ranging from marketing information and technology to e-business consulting, information technology architecture and even dot-com entrepreneurship. The growth comes in spite of an increasing awareness that e-commerce, in its narrowest sense, seems to have gone the way of the buggy whip. “The whole business curriculum has to have certain underlying elements,” said Larry Penley, chair of the International Association for Management Education and dean of the College of Business at Arizona State University, of the training needed to manage a company in today’s environment. “Decision making, data base knowledge, organizational structures, performance measures and legal and ethical issues have all changed as a result of the digital economy. All students need to get that.” At Woodbury, which will offer about 30 hours of e-business courses, the curriculum will focus on how to use e-business within an organization rather than electronic commerce as the business itself. “We had the dot-com period and that was trying to treat e-commerce as an end in itself,” said King. “Most of us knew that wasn’t going to fly.” Woodbury is launching its new program with a $310,000 grant from the Fletcher Jones Foundation of Los Angeles, seed money that allows the university to get underway.

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