Maturing of E-Commerce Education in Our Curricula, The

C2C (consumer to consumer) e-commerce also started in 1995 with the advent of eBay.com. C2C e-commerce involves a consumer as both the seller and buyer, with the transaction taking place through an intermediary. Auction sites (eBay.com, uBid.com, Overstock.com to name a few) represent the best examples of C2C e-commerce. It should be noted that auction sites may also be B2C, as some of the sellers are large and small businesses, not just consumers.

Governments have recognized the advantages of e-commerce. As a result, G2C (government to consumer), C2G (consumer to government), G2B (government to business and B2G (business to government) sites have sprung up at the Federal, state, and local levels. One of the largest government e-business sites is run by the 1RS for information availability (G2C) and tax return filings (C2G).

Today, use is rising in every type of e-commerce. Businesses and governments are recognizing the advantages of e-commerce. The increased importance and use of e-commerce has not gone unnoticed by the education community.

3. E-COMMERCE EDUCATION

E-commerce creates a new way of doing business. The Internet is playing host to the world's largest potential marketplace. It is an expanding field that needs a large workforce with e-commerce skills and knowledge to support its growth. Educational institutes have responded swiftly to this demand by changing their curricula and teaching methods. Educators have designed e-commerce curricula, e-commerce courses, e-commerce tools and environments which provides and supports teaching and learning related to e-commerce.

From information systems (IS) educators' perspective, e-commerce education requires grounding in business and information technologies. ?-commerce education should well cover the technical foundation of enabling technologies for e-commerce as well as latest e-commerce technologies. There is no end to the technological revolution, which is one of the essential drivers behind e-commerce. These include programming languages, markup languages, network technology, security technology, database technology, wireless technology, multimedia technology, etc. that are essential to the development of e-commerce infrastructure.

In addition to the information systems concepts, aspects, e-commerce requires non-technical knowledge and skills from business and other disciplines. These cover legal aspects, taxation, business processes re-engineering, supply chain management, customer relation-ship management, and marketing,, just to name a few. This is why many of the e-commerce education programs are multidisciplinary in nature.

It is true that business based programs generally focus more on non-technical knowledge and skills and information systems programs focus more on e-commerce technologies' knowledge and skill. Basically, e-commerce matches the generally understanding of the difference between businessoriented and technologies-oriented programs. One challenge in e-commerce education is to provide students with a balance of the technical and non-technical aspect of ecommerce while still allowing sufficient time for discipline specific instruction to be delivered.