Research Opinion: A Storyteller’s Guide to Problem-Based Learning for Information Systems Management Education

Abstract

More than a decade ago, Lowry & Turner (2005) provided evidence-based recommendations regarding what students of information systems (IS) management education should learn and how should they learn it. Although their recommendations for how IS management should be taught remain valid, these recommendations need to be updated to account for recent advances in technologies that enable multimedia learning. Promoters of such technologies promise enhanced cognitive and behavioural outcomes, but this promise remains unreached, reflecting the underdeveloped literature of multimedia-enabled learning. To help attain this promise and rejuvenate the multimedia-learning literature, we offer a roadmap for new areas of research that would inform the design and use of a novel form of multimedia materials: narrative animated videos (NAVs). NAVs represent a form of self-determined learning that features immersive, story-based content. We argue that their use will intrinsically motivate users to process the materials to completion, thereby enhancing cognitive and behavioural outcomes, and will thus catalysing the effectiveness of the team-based learning and self-regulated learning modes for problem-based learning (PBL) delivery of IS management education. This compelling roadmap corresponds to meaningful IS research because it centres on a topic that the IS literature has long examined—the role of user motivation—, and because its theoretical contributions invite specific paths of research for informing the design of the PBL delivery of IS management education within an information systems artefact.

Keywords: Narrative animated video (NAV), storytelling, multimedia learning, motivation theory, theory-driven multimedia design, information systems (IS) research leadership, problem-based learning