L. M. Hunt

Balancing Marketing Education and Information Technology: Matching Needs or Needing a Better Match?:

The use of new information technology in marketing education has been widely, and often uncritically, accepted as both inevitable and beneficial with little in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, which is both a new mode of teaching (and learning) and a competency domain in its own right. This article examines both the potential advantages and dangers of information technology in the context of creating knowledge workers for the marketing industry. Research findings are presented to illustrate that students have distinctively different learning profiles and experiences, and these affect how students respond to traditional and new technological modes of teaching. The authors suggest that acceptance of new technologies in education by students will rely heavily on the ability of educational institutions to manage the change process.

Computerised Content Analysis for Measuring Critical Thinking within Discussion Forums

The growing popularity of online education has seen an increasing acceptance of the use of discussion forums as a means of promoting collaboration and interaction among distance education students. The fact that transcripts of these discussion forums can be saved as a permanent digital record has provided researchers an opportunity to analyse the interactions among participants and investigate evidence of cognitive and metacognitive activity. This paper investigates some of the methodologies adopted by researchers who have attempted to analyse discussion forum transcripts, concentrating on methodologies that attempt to measure cognitive processes and critical thinking. It also investigates the use of computers in the content analysis process and describes how a tool using neural network has been successfully used to analyze transcripts. The paper introduces a computerized tool, which aims to allow different content analysis methodologies to be compared. The paper will be of interest to those who use discussion forums in their teaching activities and wish to measure the cognitive processing activities of discussion forum participants.