Leveraging E-Commerce to Stand Up an Online Educational Program

This paper defines how an online educational program can be established for any university, and proposes how the university might leverage existing E-commerce products and services to create and operate an effective team learning environment. While implementing the online program, universities should seize the opportunity to create an effective learning organization. To do so in an expedited time frame, the online system should reduce development costs by leveraging existing E-commerce products and services. This paper, therefore, defines a System of Systems (SoS) architecture capturing existing E-commerce products that, collectively, could satisfy a university’s need for standing up a leading online educational program that facilitates organizational learning. The recommended SoS architecture accommodates both the individual and organizational learning processes. The importance of achieving a learning environment is perhaps even greater for educational institutions, than it is for commercial businesses, since there is more leading-edge information to capture. When the potential information sources of student and faculty research, course content, curriculum advisory boards, and administrators are all captured, and internalized into the collective organization, a synergy will be realized that is much greater than the sum of the individual contributions. Implementing the recommendations contained herein for establishing an online educational program could result in a disruptive innovation situation where the first universities to do so leap frog existing online providers. The quality of the education students receive will be enhanced since the course content is supplemented by the learning inherent in using online collaboration tools to establish a learning organizational environment, and is sure to increase interest in the program drastically