Dr. Grandon Gill holds an AB (cum laude) from Harvard College and an MBA (high distinction) and DBA from Harvard Business School. He teaches introductory and intermediate courses in programming for undergraduates and also teaches case method capstone courses in the MIS undergraduate, MS-MIS and Executive MBA programs. He has also taught a variety of IT courses during his tenure at USF, from computer systems concepts to doctoral case methods. He received USF’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and 2013.

Dr. Gill has published or edited more than 40 case studies, most recently for the Journal of IT Education: Discussion Cases. His recent book, Informing with the Case Method, has been the basis of workshops in the U.S. and around the globe. Thus far in 2013, venues have included the NSF TUES PI Conference in Washington D.C., RMIT: Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, the United Nations Staff College in Turin, Italy, and at the 3rd International Symposium on Integrating Research, Education, and Problem Solving (Special Track on Case Methodologies), Orlando Florida.

Dr. Gill is passionate about using technology as a teaching tool and has studied distance learning, strategy, and practice, alternative course designs, and tools for course development and delivery, all under the general heading of informing science. His research in this area has been published in many journals, including Informing Science, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, the Journal of Information Systems Education, eLearn, and the Journal of IT Education. He has also published multiple times in MIS Quarterly, the MIS discipline’s leading journal—his most recent article considering the MIS fields from an informing science perspective. His academic service includes stints on the editorial boards of six journals. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: the International Journal of the Emerging Transdiscipline and the Journal of IT Education: Discussion Cases. He serves as a Governor and Fellow of the Informing Science Institute.

Recently, a small number of U.S. research universities have introduced terminal business degrees that specifically target working executives. These degrees focus on learning to apply research methods to business problems with the expectation that candidates will remain in practice after they receive their degrees. Because complex business problems demand interdisciplinary solutions, these programs diverge significantly from their disciplinary PhD counterparts. Rather than training doctoral students as apprentices seeking to acquire the skills of the academic research craft, these executive students are viewed as long term partners who need to develop a research skill set that complements, rather than duplicates, that of their professorial counterparts. The presentation looks at the design of some of these programs –many of which are intentionally constructed to break down academic silos – and reports on the first year of the newly launched DBA program at the University of South Florida.