Assessing Quality of a Business and Information Technology Alignment Large Enrollment Course

The alignment of Business and Information Technology (BITa) has permeated almost all companies today, mainly due to the benefits that are perceived in their effectiveness and efficiency of their processes, both internal and external. Therefore, higher education must ensure the best settings for equipping IT-related professionals with appropriate BITa knowledge and skills. Consequently, practices related to course quality assessment emerge as critical and helpful since they are capable of generating information to improve teaching and learning processes. This study aims to describe and discuss quality assessment paths for three essential aspects in a large enrollment BITa course: examinations' design, workload, and alignment of activities and concepts to learning objectives. The course includes three main activities to promote the learning process: consultancy project development, examinations, and practical sessions with IT. We developed mixed-method research to analyze through surveys (N=110), focus groups (four sessions), workload estimator (N=251), and expert consultation (nine experts), the quality of the three aspects of interest. Data indicates that the course curriculum is well-designed, facilitating the development of BITa knowledge and skills in students. The results also uncover interesting information on helpful pedagogical practices to improve the course curriculum. The proposed approach could be extrapolated to other BITa courses and other courses with large enrollment to understand the students' experiences in relation to the three critical characteristics of learning and teaching practices studied.