Below are your tasks, with an estimate of the time required for each. Please finish everything by Class 2 except Homework 2. All readings are in the Course Reader.
The first two items complete the Introduction to Course and E-Commerce module.1) [1 hr] Read M. Bloch, Y. Pigneur, A. Segev, "On the Road of Electronic Commerce -- a Business Value Framework, Gaining Competitive Advantage and Some Research Issues," March 1996, 19 pages, on-line at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~mbloch/docs/ roadtoec/ec.htm. This is an extended version of a paper that appeared in Proceedings of the Ninth International EDI-IOS Conference, Bled, Slovenia, June 1996. Not a new paper, but an intelligent commentary worth reading once a year for the next few years in light of current e-commerce events. Notice especially:
Items 3-5 continue the Business-to-Consumer Electronic Commerce module.3) [15 min] Read A. Geoffrion, "Business Models for E-commerce," September 1998, linked to course home page. As mentioned in the Syllabus, one of the unifying threads running through this course is the quest for a comprehensive collection of business models for commercial Web sites in terms of which to describe them and think productively about how to make them succeed. You are invited to help flesh out and improve this initial draft, which will be revised as new ideas come in. There will be an on-line class discussion group devoted to this topic accessible through the Course Home Page. Remember that your contributions to this and other class discussion groups will count heavily toward the "participation" portion of the course grade.
4) [15 min] Read M.V. Rafter, "Pushing the Envelope," LA Times, February 9, 1998. This is a nice piece on Web-based bill payment, one of the values that can be added by the sites profiled here. This reading is pertinent to Homework 1 (please see the next item). The author wrote me that she follows this general topic closely, and has written more than a half dozen stories for the LA Times and Internet-oriented trade press. She offered to speak with me about this topic, and this offer may extend to you if you develop an interest in it.
5) [1 hr] HOMEWORK 1: Customer Service Profiles [2 hrs -- 1 hr week 1, 1 hr week 2 (due)] Please finish and turn in this homework problem, which was detailed in the Week 1 Assignment sheet.
The next three items continue the module on the Information Technology Foundations of E-Commerce.6) [1.2 hr] Read K-W (Kalakota and Whinston, one of your texts) Chapter 3, "WWW-Applications," but only skim sections 3.5 and 3.6. This is good material. The skimmed sections are on intranets, which are very important but not a major focus of this course. Notice particularly the material in section 3.4 on Web-based customer service, which is pertinent to Homework 1.
7) [1.4 hr] Read K-W Chapter 4, "WWW-Concepts and Technology". The scope of this chapter is appropriate for this course, but its technical depth is not sufficient. Supplementary material will be added over the next few weeks.
8) [1 hr] HOMEWORK 2: Basic HTML and Web Page Publishing [2 hrs -- 1 hr week 2, 1 hr week 3 (due)] To be realistic and creative within your organization about e-commerce, you need to have some technical understanding of the Internet, the Web, and associated technologies. One of the things you need to learn is the rudiments of Web page authorship. There are tools that shield you from HTML tags, including Netscape Composer (which will be your main authoring tool aside from Word’s ability to save documents as HTML files), but you still need to know a good bit about HTML. You will need this knowledge also in this course to refine your personal home page and certain assignment/project materials for publication on the Web.
You will receive some instruction on building and uploading Web pages at Workshop 1 during Class 2, and thereafter you will be largely on your own to improve your skills -- which you should endeavor to do throughout most of the quarter. This will include learning more HTML.
One of the most acclaimed on-line HTML tutorials is by E.S. Meyer at http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html. Start working through this tutorial from the beginning. Stay in sequence, and do not neglect the Quizzes or the interactive exercises. If you know no HTML at the outset, probably you will only have time to finish the basic "Introduction to HTML". If you know some HTML already, you can move faster and get into the second part, "Forms and Obscurities" and perhaps even the third part "Here’s Wilbur!".
To guide your allocation of effort, here is a list of the most important material, roughly in decreasing order of importance. In the first part: everything except perhaps the tags for Definition Lists, Emphasis, Strong, Typewriter-text, and Underline. In the second part: sections 1, 2 (the preformatted text tag only), 3, and 4. In the third part: sections 1, 2, 3, 4 (Font of Changes only), 6, and 8. Realistically, you’ll need more time than the hour or so budgeted in this homework to complete even this subset of the 3-part tutorial. I hope that you will choose to invest that additional time on your own.
Once you have some HTML under your belt, you will be able to make sense of much of what comes up when you give Netscape or Composer a View/Page Source command. Doing this on nice pages you encounter will teach you a lot about how different sites achieve the effects they do. Doing this on pages you are making in Composer will quickly confirm that Composer is just a simplified way to enter most of the HTML tags you have learned, and some more besides. When Composer produces a result you don’t like, and fiddling with it doesn’t seem to be getting you anywhere, you can give Composer an Edit/HTML Source command and directly specify the right tags.
Now it is time to work on your personal home page. If you already have a home page, please make it more elaborate using some of the new tags you learned. You can work in a combination of Composer and writing HTML with a text editor like WordPad. For the latter mode, you need to tell Composer to use the text editor of your choice via Edit/Preferences. I have my External Editor for HTML Source set to C:\Program Files\Accessories\Wordpad.exe.
Make your personal Web page public if it is not already so. The URL should be http://personal.anderson.ucla.edu/YourFirstName.YourLast Name/index.htm .
Your public personal home page will be graded, so be sure it goes beyond the simple staff-generated pages that new students get. The content is up to you, but remember that it will be accessible to tens of millions of people around the world and your next employer.
Now put up your Homework 1 profiles (not necesssarily the attachments). Your homeworks, which you will place in the directory http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/ student/YourFirstName.YourLastName/, will be accessible only within Anderson. We need strict naming conventions so that links to your work can be indexed and placed on the course Web site. Please name the homeworks hw1.htm, hw2.htm, etc. So the complete URL for your first homework, for example, will be http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/student/YourFirstName.YourLastName/hw1.htm .
Your Web authoring skills in this course include the ability to write a document in Word, save it as HTML, view the result in a Netscape browser, grimace at the dopy things Word has done to your nice document, and make at least cosmetic improvements in the HTML file (using Composer or by directly editing the HTML) so that it looks good rather than klunky in the browser. You can practice this standard modus operandi when you put up your Homework 1 profiles, and again when you put up certain other homeworks as Web pages.
The mechanics of preparing and posting these Web pages will be covered in Workshop 1 during Class 2, so during the second week you need only concentrate on learning HTML and working on these pages on your laptop.
FYI, other good Web resources on HTML are J. Burns’ HTML Goodies at http://www.htmlgoodies.com/, D.J. Quad’s Ultimate HTML Site at http://www.quadzilla.com/, and the reference below. A fine resource of much broader scope is the Web Developer’s Virtual Library at http://www.wdvl.com.
Reference: "A Beginner’s Guide to HTML," The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998, on-line at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimerAll.html.
9) [1 hr] Read the back part of the Syllabus, with special attention to the Term Project. Think about what kind of a project you wish to do and with whom you might do it. Discuss these matters with your classmates, with a view to locking down your team and topic by Class 3 (October 21).