1. Tired of Teaching Software Applications?
- Author
-
Lippert, Susan K. and Granger, Mary J.
- Abstract
Many university business schools have an instructor-led course introducing computer software application packages. This course is often required for all undergraduates and is a prerequisite to other courses, such as accounting, finance, marketing, and operations management. Knowledge and skills gained in this course should enable students not only to understand "the mechanics" but also to apply learned skills to more complex problems during their business careers. Many entry-level positions, regardless of the discipline or industry, require some knowledge and understanding of several software application packages. Therefore, students in this first information systems course usually learn World Wide Web searching techniques using a browser, an operating system, a word-processing package, a spreadsheet package, and some presentation graphics. This paper summarizes problems with the formal instructor-led computer lab and provides some additional rationale for selecting self-paced software over traditional classroom instruction. The outcomes of 24 students using self-paced multimedia instruction to learn Windows 95, Netscape, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are reported. Students completed an initial questionnaire and were pre-tested on Excel. At the end of six weeks, students completed an exit survey and were pretested on all applications. It was concluded that the self-paced software offered additional benefits to the lecture-based presentation. (Author/MES)
- Published
- 1998