Abstract: The paper discusses a novel educational initiative in e-commerce pedagogy where students work on an e-government project. The paper describes a two-semester joint e-government project conducted by the town of Amherst, NY, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. During the first semester, students in a graduate e-commerce course in the School of Management were instructed to identify and analyze management issues valuable for small or middle size local government. In the second semester graduate students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering designed and implemented prototypes of three e-government portals: an on-line action site for governmental procurement (E-Procurement), a portal for reservation of community recreation facilities (E-Recreation), and a portal for online dog registration (E-DogRegistration) combining a central registry of dog owners with distributed veterinarian databases. The objective of this initiative is twofold. First, it saves the local government resources by eliminating duplication of services and by using students as developers. Second, it provides students with real life hands-on experience. The paper discusses both the technical issues involved in the implementation of the project, and the management issues that need to be taken into account to enhance the e-commerce experience for the ordinary citizen and local governments.

Keywords: E-government, E-commerce education, Andragogy, Adult learning, E-government portals

Download this article: JISE - Volume 15 Number 2, Page 127.pdf

Recommended Citation: Song, Y. I., Rao, H. R., Braynov, S. B. (2004). Bringing E-Government into the Classroom: A Case of E-Commerce Education. Journal of Information Systems Education, 15(2), 127-138.