Abstract: This paper presents a learning unit that addresses quality design in relational data models. The focus on modeling allows the learning to spans analysis, design, and implementation enriching pedagogy across the systems development life cycle. Thriving Systems Theory presents fifteen choice properties that convey design quality in models integrating aspects of aesthetics, the more subjective phenomena of satisfaction; a quality perspective more expansive than that usually found in software engineering, the traditional “objective” notion of metrics. Recent IS curriculum guide-lines compress software development pedagogy into smaller and smaller pockets of course syllabi. Where undergraduate IS students may once have practiced modeling in analysis, design, and im-plementation across several courses using a variety of languages and tools they commonly now experience modeling in two or three courses in at most a couple of paradigms. And in most of the-se courses their modeling focuses on acceptable syntax rather than achieving design quality in in-formation systems. Learning design quality may once have been an osmotic side effect of devel-opment practice, but now it must be a conscious goal in pedagogy if it is to be taught at all. This learning unit is intended as an adaptable framework to be tailored to the coursework and the over-all objectives of specific IS programs.

Keywords: design quality, Design, relational data modeling, IS curricula, IS pedagogy

Download this article: ISEDJ - V11 N4 Page 18.pdf

Recommended Citation: Waguespack, L. (2013). A Design Quality Learning Unit in Relational Data Modeling Based on Thriving Systems Properties . Information Systems Education Journal, 11(4) pp 18-30. http://isedj.org/2013-11/ ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2012)