E-commerce course progress survey: general feedback

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 30, 2004 [2933 views]

I set my students some questions to monitor their progress through the first part of this year’s course. Over 80% of the students filled in the online survey and the information they provided is illuminating. I have broken up my comments into several postings that I hope will be useful for them and for others studying this area:

Participation

Some students are not completing the work required of them during the module. They may hope to pass the exam without any effort but in my experience many of these people will do poorly. Try and make sure that you complete all the exercises and read this site every couple of days. I am using this to post lots of additional information and pointers. You will not get far on the lecture notes alone.

Follow the instructions

You have been asked to select a company from a list of 10 that have been approved. Only 25% of you have selected one so far or suggested others for approval. Some of you have selected companies that have not been approved: Debenhams, We Sell Towels and London Zoo are not approved and won’t be unless they are formally requested. Please make sure you always read the instructions and ask if you are not clear.

Recommendations for improving an ecommerce site

Some of these suggestions were very well thought through and well explained. I will provide you with an edited list of them for you to use as a checklist. You need to look for those that will have the biggest impact on the store. In some cases this will be simply using your judgement but increasingly we can use evidence from previous experiments to prioritise these changes.

Definitions

I asked you to define (and explain the importance of) a variety of terms including payment partner, fulfilment, affiliate scheme, DDA compliance, hosting, and customer feedback mechanisms. I will define these in a separate posting and a third for business models.

It is clear from the definitions that some of you cannot be doing any reading or research and that others have difficulty in expressing the ideas succinctly. Can I suggest that you do a search for all the terms that are unfamiliar and compile yourselves a glossary? In an exam or a job interview you are likely to be asked about these sorts of terms and to look convincing you need to research and internalise them. If you don’t understand a term then comment here and I will try and define it for you. There is no shame in not knowing at this stage.

Learn to write simple answers and statements

The exam for this module is going to require you to write short sentences or bulleted lists in answer to questions about your case study companies. You will not be expected to write long essays but to pull key nuggets of information from the material you have prepared and your growing knowledge of the industry.

Many of you need to practice writing answers and make sure that they are answering the whole question. I asked you to define and explain. Few of you did both and in an exam you would have lost half the marks.

Independent study

I asked you to indicate what you have been doing and what you are planning to do around this subject. A good number of you have set up web servers at home, started experimenting with tools and scripting languages such as PHP, linked servers and databases and started to learn xHTML or are planning to do so. I would really urge you all to do some of these simple things. A couple of days of real effort (working with a small team) will pay tremendous dividends in terms of understanding. It is easy to be too busy but this course is not simply about passing an exam; it is about becoming a part of this industry.

Overall

Despite the above more than half the group really seem to be getting on top of this module and enjoying it. My task now is to keep stimulating their interests and help the others catch up. Thanks for all the input. It is really making my job much more interesting.

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