Experience with Teaching Electronic Commerce

CS453, Electronic Commerce Technologies, is an elective course taken primarily by computer science and computer engineering students in their senior year. The course was originally offered using a traditional lecture plus homework approach, but with support from NSF DUE CCLI we added a hands-on programming laboratory that met three hours per week and provided mentored learning for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, CGI, SQL, and PHP. Students liked the material but objected to the inflexible weekly format. With additional university support we transitioned to virtual labs that better aligned the students' experience with the 24/7 nature of the Internet. In fall 2005 we will compare one group using these virtual labs with another group using Tablet PCs, Conference XP, and OneNote