Course Objectives

This course covers the theories, concepts and tools used to implement e-commerce web sites. E-commerce consists primarily of the buying, selling, and marketing of products and services over the Internet. The goal of the course is to teach you how to build content rich, secure, scalable, reliable and usable transaction-oriented web sites. During the course we will cover a broad range of issues related to building and managing e-commerce web sites.

E-commerce web sites make heavy use of database-driven, dynamically generated web pages. In this course you will further develop your knowledge of ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server and Visual Studio from MIS 324. Topics include Entity Framework (Microsoft's ORM), building web site administration pages, publishing and consuming web services, AJAX, interacting with legacy systems via screen-scraping, performing data validation, LINQ (language integrated query), stored procedures, application and server configuration, designing for search engine optimization, and encryption concepts, and electronic payment. Specific course topics are modified each time the course is offered to reflect the rapid evolution of web technologies.

E-commerce is a broad field that incorporates business management, strategic and technical aspects. The course has been designed to provide students with the flexibility to focus on specific e-commerce topics that are of particular interest to them. It will also provide a broad overview of the major issues relevant to e-commerce.

Required Textbooks

Required: none

An e-commerce specific textbook will not be used. The topic of e-commerce is changing so rapidly that books on the topic are out of date before they are printed. I have reviewed several e-commerce books and have not found one that is worth adopting for the course. Fortunately there is a tremendous amount of current and relevant information available both on-line and in various printed sources.

Course Prerequisites

All students should have taken the required prerequisite course MIS 324 (ASP.NET) or receive instructor's permission.

Course Web Site

Current information about the course schedule and assignments are posted on the course website: http://yorktown.cbe.wwu.edu/sandvig/mis424/ ( or Google "MIS 424")

Course Policies

Grading: Course grades will based on the following criteria:

Assignments: Assignments are due 15 minutes before class on the day shown on the course schedule. Submit assignment URLs via the Canvas course management system.

Late Assignments: Late work and broken URLs will be penalized two points (out of 10 points per assignment) per 24-hours, starting at the due date (one second after the due date is tagged late by Canvas). You can expect to have technical problems and should build safety time in your schedule to provide some protection.

Exams: A midterm will be given in the 8th or 9th week. No final exam will be given.

Presentations:Students will research a topics they find particularly interesting and present on the topic to the class. Students will be asked their preferences for topics and team members and Dr. Sandvig will construct a presentation schedule that accommodates these preferences as much as possible. Each team will present on two or three topics. Presentations should be 25-30 minutes in length.

The presentations are a significant part of the course grade and the teams are expected to do a professional job researching and presenting their topics. To help the teams stay on track and do a good job the following procedure is required of all teams.

One week prior to the scheduled presentation date each team must meet with Dr. Sandvig and submit a one-page detailed outline of their presentation. Dr. Sandvig will review the outline and discuss it with the team. It is preferable for all presenters to attend the meeting. This meeting can be done after class (time permitting) or during office hours. The team's level of preparedness for this meeting is factored into the team's presentation grade.

Also, please look over the presentation tips.

Peer Evaluations: All students are required to complete peer evaluations. Grades cannot be completed until evaluations are received from all team members.

It is important that all team members contribute their share. Peer evaluations are used to adjust grades downward for team members who do not contribute their share. They are not used to adjust grades upward of those who contributed more than their share since all team members should strive towards an equal division of effort.

Project: The term project is your opportunity to be creative and build most anything of your choosing in ASP.NET or PHP. It could be an e-commerce site, community site, additional enhancements to your music store, or most anything related to e-commerce. It is highly recommended that you discuss your ideas with Professor Sandvig before you start on the project.

Privacy warning: Dr. Sandvig and CBE staff have access to your accounts for grading and trouble shooting. Do not put any confidential or private information into your accounts.

Plagiarism: You are encouraged to work with other students in the class, but all work that you turn in for grading must be your own. Taking credit for another students work is plagiarism and is a violation of WWU academic policy. If you have any questions regarding cheating, plagiarism or WWU's Academic Policies see Appendix D of the University Catalog or talk with Professor Sandvig.

Microsoft DreamSpark Software

Students enrolled in MIS courses may download free copies of Microsoft's developer software. The complete developer software list available is quite extensive and includes Windows OS, Office, Visual Studio, Expression Studio and SQL Server. None of these products are required for MIS 314.

You will receive an email via your WWU email from eAcadamy during the first week or two of the quarter containing instructions on how to download the software.

Some of these tools are very large. Before downloading the software it would wise to compare your computer's free disk space to the recommend system requirements for the software (Amazon.com lists the system requirements for the products).

You must be currently enrolled in a MIS course to be eligible for the free software. You will not be eligible after the quarter ends unless you are enrolled in another MIS course. This offer is available through Microsoft's DreamSpark program.

Assessment of Student Performance

The following table summarizes how student performance is assessed relative to the course objectives. The learning outcomes in the left-hand column are assessed by the assessment method marked with an "X" in the right-hand columns.