Commerce Prof. Katherine Chudoba is going back to school by participating in a new online "e-Education" course sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
E-education, part of PricewaterhouseCoopers' University Initiative program, is designed to teach interested professors about the latest in information technologies so they can educate themselves and their students with current business practices.
"The e-Education program is one of the products that the PricewaterhouseCoopers University Initiative has developed specifically for our academic audience. It is the first however, that was designed exclusively for faculty," said Nicholine Goodrich, program lead for PricewaterhouseCoopers' e-Education program.
"The mission of the e-Education program is to offer distance learning on emerging technologies to alliance universities by sharing firm-wide expertise, knowledge and best practices," Goodrich said.
Chudoba said she was motivated to take the course because she hoped to gain insight into modern business.
"The program is targeted so that faculty members stay current with state-of-the art topics that hopefully will be covered in the classroom," she said. "That was definitely my first motivation. I also wanted the opportunity to participate in the distance education learning experience."
Chudoba will teach COMM 326, Business Information Systems, in the spring and she said she hopes the PricewaterhouseCoopers course will help her gain more insight into new technologies, specifically Electronic Resource Planning Systems -- which is the main topic of the course.
ERP is a way in which diverse computer systems can communicate with one another.
"In some cases ERP is the glue that holds the class together, so hopefully learning more about it will pay off when I teach the class in the spring," Chudoba said.
She explained that the class is conducted with audio headphones connected to a PC, where professors log in at the same time to discuss topics. She added that participants in the course also study individually for about two weeks by viewing slide show presentations and reading various articles from publications such as the Harvard Business Review and the PwC Technology Forecast.
Goodrich said participants were selected for this pilot of the e-Education program as a result of a comprehensive survey that was conducted in April. PricewaterhouseCoopers surveyed 173 university professors nationwide to gauge their interest in curriculum enrichment through PricewaterhouseCoopers-sponsored training. Goodrich maintained that nearly 80 percent of respondents indicated they were interested in such a service on the Internet. Three topics emerged as being of greatest interest: enterprise resource planning, e-commerce and supply chain management.
Only a few weeks after its inception, and with only one online audio meeting, the e-Education program received mostly positive evaluations.
"From my perspective it went very well. The content was both appropriate for faculty members who knew something about the topic but got into enough detail that it will help us use specific examples in the classroom," Chudoba said.
Survey results from most of the participants were similar to Chudoba's reaction.
"The response to the program has been overwhelmingly positive with some constructive criticism for improvement which we plan to incorporate as early as the next spring offering of this course," Goodrich said.
Chudoba said the course will help bring more real world examples to her classroom.
"Looking at the implementation of an actual company's system means that I can bring more stories, rather than in general say how something works," she said.
Fourth-year Commerce student Lavar Wagner said he believes in the real-world teaching encouraged through the e-education program, partly because he helped work with University Initiatives during an internship at PricewaterhouseCooper's last summer.
"I think [PricewaterhouseCooper's e-Education] is an excellent program," Wagner said. "The one question we need to ask ourselves is are we going to need to apply this when we gradate? When Prof. Chudoba teaches this we will know we'll need it."
"I really appreciate PwC's commitment to the University," Chudoba said.
Goodrich also said PwC hopes to maintain a healthy relationship with the University through programs such as University Initiatives.
"Faculty from the School of Commerce have expressed a specific interest in gaining access to the resources that have been made available by the University Initiative [including a speaker series and an internship program] as a complement to their curriculum," she said. "I believe that we are looking forward to a future of a more established relationship with the School of Commerce at U.Va."
She added that PwC has a stake in maintaining University Initiative programs.
"The investment that was made in the e-Education project was just an extension to the academic community of our general philosophy -- which is that as a corporate citizen we have an obligation to re-invest in our community," Goodrich said. "The end result of the program, which is well-informed faculty and students [who are our potential employees] provides enormous benefit to enhancing the quality of our future employees and clients."
According to Goodrich, future plans for the e-Education program include increased course offerings, more detailed subject matter in subsequent sequels to current topics, more media-rich information and increased instructor-led sessions.
Chudoba said she would be interested in participating in another online course that continued what she already learned through e-Education.
"It would need to be another topic relevant to something I'm teaching in the classroom, so I could weave it into COMM 326," she said.
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