IT takes two to tango: New teaching approach for Excel, Access

It’s a longstanding cliché that students learn best by doing, but sometimes, the kind of “doing” can make all the difference. That’s one of the key takeaways from a recent decision by two information systems professors to change the way they teach CIS 105 — Computer Applications and Information Technology.

It’s a longstanding cliché that students learn best by doing, but sometimes, the kind of “doing” can make all the difference. That’s one of the key takeaways from a recent decision by two information systems professors to change the way they teach CIS 105 — Computer Applications and Information Technology. All business majors are required to take this foundational course during their first semester at the school. In the 2013 fall semester 2,600 students were enrolled in the class.

The class is critical to student success because it immerses them in modern business concepts and introduces them to two of the most useful software programs in the world of business: Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. Before any of the students can advance, they have to prove that they’ve mastered those two key programs. For years at the W.P. Carey School, software simulations of Excel and Access walked students through scripted problems and directed them toward the final correct answer.

This simulation-based approach is commonly used at most universities. But it’s no longer used at W.P. Carey, and according to CIS 105 professors Robert Wood and Matt McCarthy, their students stand to benefit. Starting in the fall 2013 semester, Wood and McCarthy introduced students to a completely new curriculum — one that still demanded that they learn Access and Excel, but in a way that challenged them more fully and, ultimately, forced them to learn the programs much more completely than they ever could have through the simulations.

The new curriculum is just the latest innovation for CIS 105. The class is known for new approaches, such as a two week module that debuted last spring when Microsoft Evangelist Randy Guthrie visited to help teach 1,000 students how to build and launch apps for Microsoft Windows phones.

Learning to excel

The product that Wood and McCarthy are using in CIS 105 was developed by faculty at Brigham Young University to provide students with a more realistic Access and Excel experience. The cloud-based curriculum downloads a complex problem directly onto students’ computers, monitors them as they make their way through it and then immediately sends theirs grade back to a central server. In short, the new system is fast, efficient and, most importantly, challenging. “The first advantage of this product is pedagogical,” says Wood, a lecturer in information systems who has been teaching CIS 105 for years. “Students are actually in there using Excel and Accces.

They can poke around, they can explore things and the emphasis is really on finding the final answer. With the old system, the students had to follow a script, and if they didn’t do it the right way the first time, they could just try again and try again. Because of that ‘try again’ dynamic, if the student didn’t want to learn anything, they could really just keep hitting the button until they got it right.

They could be robots and learn nearly as much.” That’s no longer an option with the new system, and Wood jokes that he’s confident the updated curriculum is doing what it was designed to do — if only because students are finding the course to be much more difficult than in years past. “I think they like it, but yes, they are finding it to be difficult,” he says. “That’s one of the ways we know it’s working. We’re probably going to have to increase the number of tutors we have working on this course, because our students are now really doing these problems instead of just going through a script. They are working much harder to learn — but they’re finding the experience to be a lot better, too.”

The improvements offered by this new curriculum extend beyond the classroom. First, the course materials for the revised course are a great deal cheaper than those required for the old one — a change welcomed by students. Second, because of the way the program is designed, it places almost no demands on the vendor’s servers. That’s no small consideration, given almost 3,000 students take CIS 105 at once — many of them attempting to complete the same assignment at the same time, right around a deadline. That mad rush had caused problems in years past, but no longer, Wood says. He explains that once the student downloads the file, almost all of the work they do is on their own computer.

The program doesn’t even require them to be connected to the Internet while they are doing the assignments and places no demands on the server at that time. “By contrast, if many students are processing a very large file on the Internet all at the same time, you can have server overload problems — particularly if a deadline is set for a specific time on a specific day,” Wood added. “Because the program downloads the work directly to the students’ machines, you don’t have that build-up and pile-up problem. We had a class of 2,600, three or four times bigger than any class we’ve had before, and it was implemented just beautifully.”

So beautifully, in fact, that Wood and McCarthy are now investigating the possibility of developing curriculums based on this model for other business courses. Those could make their debut in the years to come and, to hear Wood tell it, could prove to be just as successful as the CIS 105 experiment. “Using this product, you have the ability to build your own assignments,” he says. “So in the future we may say, ‘Well, we have a finance course coming up — what if we developed some assignments for that?’ The same would go for supply chain management, or any number of other courses.”