This paper describes the constructivist-oriented course E-Business 2 that has been part of the curriculum of the degree program Information Management at the University of Applied Sciences FH JOANNEUM since 2003 and its influence on the learners.
After a short overview on the history of this course, the paper describes the application of constructivism in the tertiary education sector taking the course E-Business 2 as an example. It furthermore focuses on the realization and time frame of the course E-Business 2 and finally gives recommendations for teaching holistic courses in general.

The course E-Business 2 has the aim to create a complete E-Business platform starting from the business strat-egy to the functional implementation within an appropriate IT-environment with the contribution of all students of one class. In order to be able to accomplish the task, all the different skills the students learnt by then have to be applied. This is why the course E-Business 2 is a great basis to apply the constructivist approach.

Constructivism is an alternative to conventional teaching approaches. It is a theory of learning where humans construct meaning individually from current knowledge structures. This philosophical framework is a set of as-sumptions about the nature of human learning that guide constructivist learning theories and teaching methods of education. According to this theory the students themselves highly influence the quality of a course and are per-sonally responsible for this quality.

The course E-Business 2 involves a whole class of students – in the past six years in average 45, a main tutor and advisory tutors from the staff of the degree program. The students have to work together to accomplish the goal of creating an E-Business platform with all the necessary tools. The students only meet the main tutor twice in a lecture set-up: in their initial lesson where they learn about the goal to be reached and where the different teams are formed; and then at the end of the semester when they present their results. However, when they need help or have questions, they can contact any tutor for advice throughout the semester.

In order to measure the learning success of this approach a quantitative study regarding different learning styles was performed. Some of the results of this study will be elaborated in this paper.

This course gives students the possibility to learn in a real-life company scenario without the risks they would face in a real company. As the students have their own management and different teams, they have the challenge to realize the given tasks in the following areas: project management, process management, system management, digital media technologies, programming, software development, workflow management, database architecture, logistics, marketing, quality management, customer orientation.

The experience of six years of teaching this constructivist course shows that the success of this course does not lie in the technologically perfect result but in the knowledge the students acquire in the area of soft skills and man-agement.

Keywords: Constructivism, holistic learning approach, tertiary education.