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October 13, 2005
In This Week's Mail
Professor Paul Ravi at East Carolina University brought my attention to the results of a survey of professors of the introduction to MIS class. The survey was sponsored, I believe, by ISWorld. Many interesting questions ... the first concerns whether or not Excel and Access are taught within the MIS course. It looks like the practice is split about 50/50.
With that split, no wonder opinions vary widely. Or, perhaps the question centers on the proper role of these tools? Are we to teach fundamental Excel and Access skills, or do we ask students to apply skills learned in a prior class to MIS topics? For example, re-enforcing IS management responsibilities by asking students to build a database application to keep track of employees, computers, and software licenses.
Bob Grauer at the University of Miami wrote to Ideas@TeachingMIS.com on this same topic. In case you don't know, Bob is the author of an excellent series of texts on Office Applications. Bob is preparing to teach the MIS class this Spring and is developing a sequence of Access projects for his class. I asked if he'd share them with TeachingMIS readers and he said 'Yes' when he likes what he has. I saw Bob demonstrate the teaching of Excel and Access at a conference two years ago in New Orleans, and he is a maestro! Watch here for his examples!
Posted by DavidK at October 13, 2005 11:18 AM | Permalink