Annual Report 2003
Foundation for the Future
The Isenberg School Chronicle
The Year in Review
Isenberg School Introduces Innovative Online Course Portal
In September, the Isenberg School rolled out an online portal that will increasingly integrate course work in its freshman and sophomore menu of core requirements. To date, the portal, which has received financial and consulting assistance from Microsoft, spans six mandatory courses: the School’s introduction to business information systems, its two semesters of introductory accounting (financial and managerial), its two-course introduction to business statistics, and its introduction to business law. “We’ve designed the portal as one-stop shopping,” observes Gino Sorcinelli, Director of the School’s Information Technology program and professor of its introductory business information systems course. On the portal’s front page, students can access an electronic bulletin board, useful campus and research Web sites, business news and stock quotes, the Google search engine, and most important of all—links to their core course Web pages. Add to that one more critical feature: a search engine that can pull up any string of information within the portal itself.
University business reference librarian Mike Davis
and Gino Sorcinelli
As the semester unfolded, student teams used the portal to research and evaluate company web sites, extract on-line articles that described company market strategies, and analyze company investment reports. At the semester’s end, each student team—responsible for a specific company—prepared and presented a report to the class that synthesized their previous work. “For the first time at the Isenberg School, the students are learning to work productively in teams as freshmen,” notes Sorcinelli. “They’re also gaining an appreciation early on that business involves interdisciplinary skills. That’s bound to help them as juniors, seniors, and graduates in the business world.”