TEACHING CASE COMBINED DISCIPLINE CAPSTONE TEAMS: USING SERVICE LEARNING TO PROVIDE A BUSINESS SOLUTION

Abstract

Computing faculty from a regional university in Oklahoma implemented a plan to combine undergraduate capstone courses in Management Information Systems (MIS), Computer Science (CS), and Multimedia (MM). The MIS course had been using experiential service learning and completing small database projects for local organizations since 2003. Based on the experiences and contacts of the MIS faculty, a decision was made to conduct an actual business related project. The project chosen was one for the alumni association of a local high school. They required a web presence and wanted something akin to Classmates.com. Originally, the alumni association contracted the project through a local commercial company. However, after one year of trying to get the local company to deliver what was needed, the alumni association contacted the MIS faculty for help in developing the site. The project required an appealing and easy to use front-end interface, a back-end database, and middleware to connect the two. The MIS class was assigned to create the database. The CS class wrote the middleware using PHP with the MIS class assisted with imbedded MySQL statements. The MM class created the front-end user interface. This teaching case presents the experiences, results, and conclusions of the project.