BA271  -  Information Technology in Business
Fall Term, 2005

Overall course objective: This class teaches how to use a computer as a partner in everyday managerial tasks like preparing presentations, building websites, or managing transactions. To do well, you will need to practice these activities on a computer and you will have to show us first-rate computer-usage skills combined with an ability to think clearly and write well.

Announcements:

December 1: How to sell your textbook Microsoft Access textbook!

I decided to continue using the same Microsoft Access textbook next term. Normally this would mean that you could go the OSU Bookstore, and they would buy your used textbook. That won’t happen this term for several reasons:

• I told the OSU Bookstore that I am unlikely to use this textbook for Spring term 2006.
• I told the OSU Bookstore that I will encourage next term’s students to buy their textbooks on-line.
• The publisher, Course Technology, has come out with a new version of this textbook, so there is little demand nationwide for used copies of this book.

Thus, the OSU Bookstore doesn’t want to buy a bunch of used textbooks that are likely to sit on the shelf until they need to be recycled.

Perhaps these issues are not important to you because you have grown to love the book and want to keep it in your personal library for handy late-night reading. Or perhaps you are independently wealthy and do not concern yourself with the cost of mundane items like textbooks. But for the rest of us, it would be nice to find a way to sell this book for a healthy fee.

Here is a strategy that makes sense to me. The OSU Bookstore has a new free service: they will let students place classified ads to sell their textbook. You can go to http://www.osubookstore.com/Textbooks_Used_Classifieds.asp and sign up to sell your textbook. You simply fill in your email address, the ISBN numbers for the books you want to sell, and your asking prices. If another OSU student looks at the classified ads and decides to buy your books, he or she will send you an email message. Then you can agree on a place and time to meet to complete the sales transaction. This nifty system cuts out the middle-man entirely: no broker’s fee, no shipping cost, and no administrative hassles.

Why would other OSU students bother with this system when they can simply go to the OSU Bookstore to purchase their textbooks? I can help with this part of the process. Just like this term, I will offer bonus points to students who complete an on-line sales transaction. To make sure next term’s BA271 students know about this process, I will post clear descriptions of the process on the BA271 Home Page starting next Tuesday. I also will send each student who is signed up to take BA271 next term an email message describing all these ideas. I plan on sending out the first of those messages next Tuesday.

I hope by taking these actions I can help students exchange textbooks in an efficient manner. I also hope you will use this experience to help you identify similar ways to conduct business efficiently as you move through your life and career.

November 30: One of your colleagues suggests:

I understand that you are offering to improve the query quiz scores if we do well on them on the final. I think this is a great idea, but I disagree with the method of improving them. If I understand your explanation correctly, then if I get a 40 out of 40 on the final my query quiz grade improves form 18/40 to 20/40. While I appreciate any points I can get, I think that if I show understanding strong enough to receive a 100% on the final that it reflects much more about my query score than a two point increase would imply.

I've discussed this issue with a number of students -- both in person and through email today. As a result, I've concluded I want to give students a strong incentive to show me on the final exam that they can write accurate queries. An excellent way to do this is to promise to increase your Query Quiz score if you do well on the query portion of the Final Exam. The Final Exam will have four queries of similar complexity to the four queries on the Query Quiz. So here is what I promise to do. If your score on the Final Exam is higher than your score was on the Query Quiz, then I will increase your Query Quiz score by 75% (seventy five percent) of the difference.

This will be most understandable if I provide a couple of examples:

	Student A	Student B	Student C
Original Query Quiz score	0	18	20
Score on queries on the Final Exam	32	40	15
Improvement in score between the exams	32	22	none
75% of the improvement	24	16.5	none
Adjusted Query Quiz score	0+24 =24	18+16.5=34.5	20

Why use 75% rather than 50% or 100%? I originally selected 50%, and many students were discouraged because that meant they were certain to lose a substantial number of points. On the other hand, I do not feel like a percentage as high as 100% is appropriate, because that would throw out all evidence from the Query Quiz. So it seems like 75% is a plausible compromise.

On a related issue, I do not want to catch people off guard with respect to how activities will be graded in this class. For that reason, I have added the following description to the syllabus page to explain how the Query Quiz will be graded:

The Query Quiz will be graded in a different manner than other activities. I will look at each query you write. If it works correctly -- hooray -- you will receive 10 points. If it produces the wrong result, I will determine how many additional steps are necessary to make it compute the right answer. For each step that I must take to make your query function correctly (such as asking the query to Sum, or adding an additional table to the top part of the query), I will deduct 5 points. If a query has more than two fatal errors, I will not let the score go below zero. Thus, you can think of this scoring system as being similar to marksmanship: a bulls-eye gets the most credit, close earns less credit, and results outside a certain distance earn no credit. Average scores on the Query Quiz for the last couple of terms have been around 50 percent. Writing accurate queries is not easy to do, and students who have practiced a lot tend to do much better than students who are caught off guard.

November 29: Two of your colleagues wrote along the following lines:

I put forth an effort on every portion of the Query Quiz and feel that I deserve some more credit for what I have accomplished.  I built the queries fairly well with a few missed or incorrect steps.  Could you please look it over a second time and reassess it.

I've concluded my response to these students is worth making generally available:

You are right to believe you did some things correctly. I've reviewed your queries, and they are show that you know how to get started in the correct direction. Unfortunately, neither in business, nor in this class, will you be rewarded for getting started in the correct direction if you make multiple fatal errors in execution while heading in the right direction.

I once again opened your Query Quiz database and looked at each query you wrote -- and I independently arrived at the same score that I arrived at last week. Each of your queries that received a zero score contained at least two fatal logic or implementation errors. Since I deduct 5 points for each fatal error, you received no credit for these queries.

This is not fun news for me to deliver ... but I think the alternative would be worse. If I gave you credit for writing queries that will generate the wrong answers because of multiple logic errors, then I would be sending you the wrong signal about how accurate or useful your current query-building skills are.

I'd be happy to review your quiz with you in person or work with you to improve your skills in this area -- I firmly believe every business student should know how to extract data from a database reliably.

Hoping this makes sense and seems reasonable,

  -- Dave Sullivan

November 28:

The number of students who earned zero points is about 5 too high in the chart to the left. Still, more students earned no credit whatsoever than earned a perfect 40-point score. Writing accurate queries is not easy, and some students were clearly caught off guard.

I’ve spent some quiet time thinking about this collective result. Many students are struggling with learning how to write queries. Ultimately, I do not care all that much about the timing of when you learn to write queries. That is, I want you to show me on the final exam that you have this skill, and I do want you to face a huge penalty if you got off to a poor start on the Query Quiz.

The final exam will have four queries of similar difficulty and complexity as the Query Quiz. If your score on the four final exam queries is higher than your score on the Query Quiz, then I boost your Query Quiz score half way up to your score on the query portion of the final exam. On the other hand, if for some strange reason, your score on the final exam queries is lower than your score on the Query Quiz, then I will leave your Query Quiz score unadjusted. I will use simple Excel function in the grade book to implement this policy.

If you have read carefully so far, you should understand I am trying to give you every incentive to become competent at writing queries. No matter how poorly you did on the Query Quiz, you can improve your original Query Quiz score by doing well on the final exam. This makes it critical to master the process of writing basic queries reliably.

Your first step should be to determine what when wrong (if anything) on the Query Quiz. Begin by looking carefully at your scores and my comments above. Then, if you didn’t get a perfect score on the Query Quiz, use the following links to determine what went wrong and how to fix it.

Here are links to this term's Query Quiz and the answer key for this term's Query Quiz.

Learning how to write basic queries is an important skill. Obviously, it will be easier to learn this skill if you are bright and have a good background in math. But the main factor I’ve found in whether people learn how to write reliable queries is practice. The more queries you write (and then check to see if they function as expected), the better you will become at writing queries.

Finally, I’ve spent my time lately on grading Access assignments and the Query Quiz … so the essay portion of the midterm exam still hasn’t been graded.

I’m hoping you find this useful …

-- Dave Sullivan

November 21: I've adjusted the lecture schedule and the due date for the Access 3 assignment somewhat:

• I've extended the due date for the Access 3 assignment until Monday the 28th at noon. This will let you complete it over the Thanksgiving break if desired.
• Tomorrow afternoon's hands-on lecture will focus on building forms.
• The evening lecture will review ideas from the Query Quiz and will describe what a normalized database is.

November 8: A thoughtful message from one of your colleagues is:

The following clause in the copyright law seems to deserve further consideration. I have highlighted in RED below the specific content that I considered. It seems to me, without further in depth research into how the law has been applied, that the student who wrote about the informal test bank used for study would not be committing copyright infringement.

This actually leads to a far more interesting thought – perhaps there would be merit in the COB developing a course that would specifically consider these types of legal issues. They are in my opinion far more interesting and instructional than many of the other course offerings.

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use³⁸

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include — 

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

My comments:  

• I fully agree it would be fun to have a class dealing with these issues.

• I remain skeptical (based solely on the little that I know of case law) about whether a website filled with exams could successfully claim a “fair use” exception. The effect on the value of the work would often be dramatic; that is, the professor would need to more frequently need to write new exams. 
       -- Dave Sullivan

November 7: One of your colleagues writes:

November 3: I received the following thoughts from your fellow classmates, and I thought you might want to read and consider their ideas ...

Dear dave,

  I wanted to express my concern about the people who plagerized on teh midterm.  I do not think many of them did so by "accident..."  When was the last time anyone thought it was a good idea to copy and paste something already online into AN EXAM???? Especially when you said that content matters so write it well!

  I think those people who you KNOW plagerized should get knocked down a grade or two at least.

   You didnt have to say "DONT PLAGERIZE" for everyone else to get the picture, I just assumed that when you were grading the paragraphs on HOW WELL I wrote it that I SHOULD BE THE ONE WHO WRITES IT!

 Just thought Id express my concern...  and my skepticism that those people didnt "mean" to cheat.

My reply to this student included: "I strongly recommend proofreading and spell-checking any message you send in a professional environment. People will judge your mental abilities by how well you write."  -- Dave Sullivan

---

Personally, I do not agree with how you are handling the situation regarding the recent midterm.  At the beginning of the term, you had us all sign an academic honesty forms, which basically said that we would not cheat or plagiarize.  Although the directions on the mid-term did not say, “if you copy work from other sites, you must give credit to the author,” it is common sense to cite work that is not your own.  We are in college, and this should go with out being said.  Furthermore, to not doc people for this mistake is absurd because it is unfair to those whole followed the directions correctly.  If someone pulled this stunt in the business world, they would either get fired, or in major trouble.  I thought that the whole point of college is to prepare students for jobs in whatever field they major in, and if students keep slipping by and never getting in trouble for their mistakes, how are they going to learn?

November 2

Almost 20 percent of my students copied material into their Featured Product essay on the midterm without using quote marks or any other method of citing the material’s original source. I’ve been deeply troubled by this, partly because the percentage is higher than in prior terms when I asked students to write a similar essay on the midterm, but also because I care about intellectual honesty – it forms the foundation for academic scholarship and personal integrity. A person without honesty has lost a large part of his or her soul; a society without honesty cannot enforce intellectual property rights, and that will cause the computing field to stagnate.

To help sort out what to do, I’ve talked with students, my faculty colleagues, and even people on the MIS Advisory Council about this incident. Here are some conclusions I’ve reached:

·        I need to accept part of the responsibility: the midterm’s instructions should have been clearer about this issue. I also should have spent more class time discussing academic honesty and plagiarism.

·        I do not think students were deliberately trying to cheat. Instead, I’ve concluded students either didn’t think about the implications of their actions, or they have been seduced by the ease of copy-and-paste operations to overlook the seriousness of the action. Thus, I’ve concluded this is clueless rather than malicious behavior.

·        Few students appear to have read the portion of the BA271 syllabus dealing with Academic Honesty, which includes:
Academic Honesty -- It only takes a few seconds to cut-and-paste a photograph or text into your web pages, and that can trick the unwary into forgetting about intellectual property rights and academic honesty. Don't let the ease of copying electronic material seduce you into forgetting the usual rules about giving credit for the sources of material prepared by others.

·        Overall, the class needs to consider how powerful tools require cautious use. No one should casually use a gun or chainsaw because these tools can quickly cause massive physical damage. Similar thoughts apply to computing. No intellectual tool is more powerful than a computer connected to the Internet. With this tool you can rapidly download illegal software, pirate copy-righted music, post a libelous message, steal someone’s identity or copy-and-paste an idea and claim it as your own. If you engage this sort behavior, do not expect to be forgiven because you plead ignorance or argue that tempting availability overcame your inherent honesty.

·        I am not interested in punishing the offenders. I want to be an educator, not a policeman.

Based on these thoughts, I’ve decided to take the following actions:

·        I rewrote the midterm’s instructions for the Featured Product page to be clearer about how to cite material copied from other sources. You will find a copy of the revised instruction at the bottom of this message.

·        I will let each student decide whether to revise or extend their Featured Product essay. If you copied material in your Featured Product page and did not cite the source, then you should take advantage of this opportunity. Thus, you will have a choice:

o       If you are happy with your original essay, then leave it alone. I will grade it with the assumption that you wrote it entirely within the time limits of the original two-hour exam.

o       If you want to revise or extend your essay – either to properly cite material or for any other reason – then follow these rules:

§         Make sure your essay is located at P:\classwork\ba271\exam\featured-product.html. I do not want to hunt for your work.

§         Do not spend longer than 90 minutes researching and revising your Featured Product essay.

§         Keep track of how long you spend researching and revising your Featured Product essay.

§         Revise your essay without outside assistance.

§         Paste this statement at the top of the body of your Featured Product page:
“I chose to revise my Featured Product page. I did this without outside assistance; that is, I did this entirely myself. In addition to the time I spent building this page during the midterm, I spent a total of XX minutes researching and revising my Featured Product page.”

§         Replace the XX with the actual time you spent researching and revising your essay.

§         Finish editing and revising your Featured Product page before noon on Monday, November 7^th.

Finally, I am interested in listening to student perspectives on this issue. I know from experience that the view from the front of the classroom can be quite different than the view from the back row.

  -- Dave Sullivan

Create a "Featured Product" page with an original essay about a recently released, multifunction flash drive.

Search the web to find information about a recently released mulitfunction flash drive; that is, a flash drive that does more than just store information. Then fill out your Featured Product page with:

       An original essay that describes the flash drive's features and explains why Corvallis Flash Drives recommends this product.

       If you copy text into your essay from another location, you must acknowledge the source. You can do this either by putting the material "in quotes like this" or by putting it in italic text like this. Immediately after the copied text, you must put a hyperlink leading to the source of the copied text like this. (Source: BA271 website)

       Two hyperlinks leading to independent reviews of flash drives. The independent reviews do not need to be about the same flash drive that is being recommended by Corvallis Flash Drives.

       Note: An independent review is NOT a company website that hypes the company's own product. An independent review will be written by an editor, customer, or reviewer who is not directly associated with the company's product.

       A picture of the flash drive being recommended. Make the picture into a hyperlink, so that if the reader clicks on the picture, the original source page containing the picture will appear.

This is the only part of the exam requiring creativity and clear writing. Do your best to write well and arrange everything in an attractive manner. Use humor if you have it. Expect us to use subjective wisdom when we grade this part of the exam so we can reward quality work.

October 27: I will be trying to organize all the material from the midterm for a while. So I won’t be harvesting the Final Website projects until Monday at noon. Thus, if you want to work more or adjust this project over the weekend … feel free to do that.  -- Dave Sullivan

October 26: CIO Update's most recent issue says IT (Information Technology) salaries and job openings will increase rapidly in 2006. You can read the entire article at IT Salaries Heading North in 2006. According to the article,

The top five jobs with the greatest increases in both salary and demand are:

• IT auditor (salary range $67,000-$94,250, an 11% increase over 2005)
• Lead application developer (salary range $72,000-$98,250, a 5.3% increase over 2005)
• Network security administrator ($67,500-$94,750, a 5.2% increase over 2005)
• Business systems analyst ($58,750-$84,750, a 5.1% increase over 2005)
• Data analyst/report writer ($54,000-$71,250, a 5% increase over 2005)

 October 24:

• I'm completely caught up on grading, so I've sent you email messages recently about the Prerequisite Exam and the Basic Website projects.
• I've revised the Practice Midterm to match the programs and ideas we have covered this term. I strongly recommend working through this activity prior to attempting to take the actual midterm on Thursday.
• I postponed the final website project's due date until Friday at noon. Please do not wait until Friday to work on it -- we will have a midterm on Thursday, and the more practice you have with building websites before Thursday's midterm, the better.

October 22: I finally finished grading the Prerequisite Exam, and I have sent email messages to everyone with detailed scores. Here is an overview of how everyone did on that exam:

October 20: I sent out grading messages about the Website Plan activity to everyone's ONID mailbox. The Prerequisite Exam is still being graded.

October 19: I recorded the following videos about how to build your website project with Nvu:

• Video 1: Getting started: Building pages, link bars, adjusting file names and page titles. (13 minutes)
• Video 2: Basic versus Final website; publishing your website. (8 minutes)
• Video 3: Using tables to hold things in position, putting in an OSU Disclaimer (7 minutes)
• Video 4: Building a basic feedback form. (10 minutes)
• Video 5: Adjusting existing questions in a feedback form. (10 minutes)
• Video 6: Adding check boxes to a feedback form. (12 minutes)
• Video 7: Adding a drop-down list to a feedback form. (6 minutes)

October 18: Quick status report:

The Treasure Hunt, Optional Fluffy Spreadsheet Competition, and Optional Textbook Buying and Selling activities have been graded. The Prerequisite Exam is still being graded.

• Building a website with Nvu is harder than building one with FrontPage because you have to take more control over how the pages are linked, how borders work, and so on. For this reason, I decided to drop an assignment from the schedule. Thus, we will not use Microsoft Producer to build a web-based movie this term. If you are curious about the Producer Tutorial activity, it is still available as part of this website, and  you could work through it on your own.

• I shifted both the Lecture Schedule and Graded Activities pages slightly to accommodate the change.

October 11: I just postponed the due date of the Website Plan activity from this Friday at noon to next Monday at noon.

October 5: Taking the Prerequisite Exam

For various reasons – such as yesterday’s network outage – some of you have not completed the Prerequisite Exam. That is OK with me – I like the idea of using an Honor Code to let students promise to behave ethically, and then letting students take the exam without having me watch them carefully.

On the other hand, I need to know who still hasn’t completed the exam, and when they will complete it. Thus, if you have not already taken the exam, I would like you to send me a short one-line email message telling me when you plan on taking it. Please make the Subject of the message "When I plan on taking the Prerequisite Exam".

I would like everyone to complete the Prerequisite Exam before Friday at 4 p.m.

October 4: More Fluffy Spreadsheet winners:

• Andus Hui submitted this 2 minute and 10 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry. Given the speed with which this model was built, I decided to overlook to fact that the column headings were poorly aligned with the numbers below them.
• Jaclyn Stenberg submitted this 5minute and 47 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Gabriel Piltzer submitted this 4 minute and 17 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Mitchell Canham submitted this 5 minute and 54 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Caroline Leibinger submitted this 4 minute and 27 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Ka Wai Yeung submitted this 4 minute and 25 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Kyle Griffith submitted this 4 minute and 58 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Jennifer Ayuyu submitted this 5 minute and 6 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Joshua Brooks submitted this 5 minute and 27 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Zachary Cartwright submitted this 5 minute and 26 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Annabel Ortega submitted this 5 minute and 6 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Allison Wilsey submitted this 5 minute and 6 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Anthony Bohan submitted this 4 minute and 16 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• David Sampson submitted this 5 minute and 20 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Andy Shelton submitted this 4 minute and 31 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.
• Krista Hubbard submitted this 4 minute and 46 second Fluffy Spreadsheet competition entry.