The role of a KBS course within IS education

This paper describes the implementation of a KBS course that was designed to integrate and deepen the understanding of concepts and ideas that are essential in IS education. A KBS course is often not included in IS education curriculum, and when it is included it is usually an elective course taken by only a few students. We describe the content, the instructional strategies and an accompanying study. Besides providing students with new tools to extend information systems capabilities, this course provides an opportunity to discuss, explore and experience issues of knowledge representation, modeling, abstraction, knowledge management and programming paradigms. This is accomplished through learning activities that involve metadata creation by students for code examples that are used throughout the course. These iterative activities are done both individually and collaboratively in teams. The paper presents some findings and discusses their implications for IS education.