TEACHING INFORMATION SYSTEMS STUDENTS TO WRITE A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW BEFORE AND DURING COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Fourth year Information Systems (IS) students are expected to write a research paper on a selected IS topic. At the University of Pretoria in South Africa, a number of challenges were faced towards reaching this goal many students have poor research and academic writing skills;the supervision load grows significantly as student numbers increase annually;and students' final research papers are rarely publishable. Some of these problems were solved by changing the module's objective to writing a systematic literature review (SLR). This paper describes how the curriculum of the module was adjusted to reach the objective and how the transition to fully remote teaching during the pandemic was managed. Blackboard Collaborate was used for synchronous online teaching and student engagement was facilitated by online learning tools, which include Jamboard. Both students and lecturers generally experienced the changes as positive. Recorded lectures are considered valuable as it enables flexible learning, and online learning tools were successfully utilised to make lectures more interactive. © Proceedings of the 2021 AIS SIGED International Conference on Information Systems Education and Research.