Towards a better understanding of learning mechanisms in information systems education

Instructors not only in higher education are regularly faced with the problem that they need to develop a new course, or to adapt an existing one to changed requirements. This is especially true for topics related to information technology (IT) since technological progress is fast in this domain. However, instructors are not prepared really well for this task since they typically have a professional and educational background in areas different from pedagogy. Therefore, some sort of methodological framework to support the systematic development and refinement of courses would be highly appreciated. This paper presents such a method, called Competence- Oriented Didactics. This approach builds upon several concepts from general didactics, most notably Klafki´s Didactic Analysis, and combines and extends these concepts. As a proof of concept, the method is applied to the refinement of an introductory course on information systems. This case study shows, among other things, that Competence-Oriented Didactics has the potential to be applicable for course (re-)design in other domains beyond IT as well.