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BA271 Syllabus PageAbout this courseFirst, BA271 will extend your ability to use a personal computer effectively. It is designed as a follow-on course to BA131 and should improve your ability to use a personal computer as a partner in completing everyday tasks like writing, planning and organizing. A major component of the course will be to learn how to database management systems in a business context. Next, we will explore issues faced by businesses when they need to complete larger tasks than can be done well with personal productivity software. For example, Excel can be used to store and record accounting transactions -- but that typically works about as well as attempting to cut a 2-by-4 in half with a hammer instead of using a power saw. Other issues arise when new computer systems make new ways of conducting business possible. Along the way, I will want you to use computers with style and class to improve your ability to communicate well. This means the course will focus on blending non-computer skills – such as creating interesting content and expressing ideas well – with computer topics like using programs effectively. For example, I won’t be impressed with how attractive your website is if you fill it with editing bloopers, lifeless ideas, a lot of pictures and no content. I will assume you have computer skills equivalent to the material taught in BA131. This includes being comfortable writing memos with a word processor, building budgets with a spreadsheet, sending and receiving email with attachments and using a graphical operating system to perform electronic housekeeping tasks. If things are not going well for you in the class, please meet with me. Do not wait until the end of the term to request help. I can help get you back on track and successfully complete the class if you communicate problems immediately. Fall 2006 Class ScheduleI split the BA271 class into two parts this term: lectures and lab sessions.
On days when we will have an exam or quiz, you will go the basement computer lab, complete the work, and deliver files either by leaving them at specific network locations or by attaching them to an email message. On those days, the lab sessions will be cancelled. Collecting Information and MaterialsFew people learn to swim from a textbook. Similarly, you should not expect a textbook to teach you how to use a computer well. Much of what you learn will come from interacting directly with a computer—either in the classroom, the computer lab, dorm room, or wherever. Learn to use the help system, set up experiments and make good guesses about how programs work, read your e-mail, and surf the Internet. This website and email will be the primary sources of assignments and information. Course textbook: This book will be used in the last half of the class only ... you will not need it for the first four weeks of the term.
For the latter half of the class, we will use Succeeding in Business with Microsoft Office Access 2003, written by Karin Bast, Leon Cygman, Gerard Flynn, and Rebekah Tidwell . AssignmentsSome assignments are reasonably simple, while others will involve more thought and effort to complete. I strongly recommend completing assignments well in advance of the due date. The computer lab will be packed right before an assignment is due and the true procrastinators will be rushing to complete it. If you run into trouble, you run the risk of not completing it on time and giving up. Plan ahead, you'll thank yourself later. When you think you have finished an assignment, please take a few minutes to review the assignment's requirements in this BA271 website. Check to make sure you did everything as requested. Test that your work has been placed at the required network location. This sort of final review of your work will catch errors and improve your performance in the class overall. Make back-up copies of your work. It only takes a few seconds to make a back-up copy of a file—or of a folder containing many files and subfolders. Having a back-up copy can save hours of rework if a file becomes lost or corrupted. If you have any questions about how to make back-up copies of an assignment, play this video. This is an essential skill in any business setting. Since the best way to learn this skill is to practice it, you are required to make a back-up copy of each assignment in a different folder and preferably on a different drive. Thus, you should expect me to be less than sympathetic if you come with a sob story about how you lost all your work and you never bothered to make a back-up copy. Submitting AssignmentsAssignments will be turned in electronically, generally by putting your work in an area of the College's network that I can see. For most assignments, I will run a program that "harvests" your work by copying it to another location on the network. This will consolidate all the assignment files, making it easier for us to open and grade them. I intend to run the harvesting program shortly after the assignment's due date and time. This means you must place your work EXACTLY where the assignment describes. For example, if you are asked to create a "Phase3" folder, but you create a "Phase 3" folder, then our harvesting program will not collect your work because your "Phase 3" folder has an extra space between the word "Phase" and the number "3." One common problem in the past has been to create files with duplicate file extensions. A file extension is the three-letter ending on each file name. For example, you may be directed to create a file named "budget.xls," but you inadvertently created "budget.xls.xls." This blunder is easy to make if you leave the settings inside Windows as they are set by default. To avoid this type of error, open My Computer or Windows Explorer and give a Tools--Folder Options command. Adjust the View settings so you do not "Hide file extensions for known file types" (see the image below). If file extensions of known file types are hidden, then an Excel file named "budget.xls" will appear on the screen as just "Budget." Then, if you want it to be named "Budget.xls," you are likely to inadvertently change its name to "Budget.xls.xls." After adding this extension, the file name will look correct on the screen, but because of its duplicate extension, it won't be harvested correctly when I use automated methods to find your work. When you adjust the settings in the dialog box shown below, I recommend putting a check box next to "Display the full path in title bar". This will make it easier to verify exactly where your files are stored.
You are responsible for making sure your work is located and named correctly. To help you avoid blunders (which can be awfully easy to make), I will build Student Pages filled with pre-built links to where your work should be located. Verify that your work has been placed in the right location by clicking on your Username (see the sample below).
If your work is in the right location, the browser should open it. If the browser displays an error message similar to:
then your work is not in the correct location, the harvesting program will not find it, and you will not receive credit for your work. Do not let this happen. Test your work, and if the test fails, figure out what is wrong and fix it prior to the due date. Each term a couple of students complain about this policy. They explain they completed the work on time and merely misplaced it. I have little sympathy for this line of thinking. It makes me wonder whether these students would try the equivalent argument on an English professor: "I wrote the essay, but I left it at home", or "I wrote the essay, but I forgot to give it to you." For most assignments, a grader will examine your work and enter scores and possibly some comments into an Excel workbook. Once all the grades have been entered for an activity, I will use Microsoft Word's mail-merge abilities to send roughly 200 "personalized" email messages containing each person's score and an explanation of how the work was graded. Lots of reasons could delay our ability to harvest a copy of your work, so you should leave your work on the network until you receive a grade for the assignment. It is a good idea to save all your assignments, grades and emails until you receive your final class grade at the end of the term. It is your backup in the event something goes wrong with my copies. Late AssignmentsDeadlines and milestones exist in business for a reason. For this class, I know grading is FAR easier and tends to be more accurate when I can grade all assignments in a batch. This gives me a huge incentive to require everyone to complete their work at a common time -- so that is exactly what I intend to do. You need to keep track of when activities are due and put the necessary work at the correct network location before each activity's due date. On the other hand, I understand that life is full of unexpected events. For this reason, I will let you completely foul up one assignment without penalty. I don't care what the problem might happen to be: sleeping through the assignment's due-date cut-off time, a sudden sickness, a death in the family, putting the assignment at the wrong network location (and forgetting to test whether it is at the correct location) or failing to start early enough to finish on time. To understand how I will make this adjustment, open the Fall 2006 Excel Gradebook and look at the Adjustment column on the Total page. It uses a formula similar to:
This scary-looking formula does something quite simple: It looks at all assignments to see which one can be boosted the most by raising its score up the median score received by other students, thereby letting you completely foul up one assignment without penalty. This adjustment will not affect your exam scores because the exams tell me how well you perform in a controlled environment. It also will not affect peer review activities, because the primary recipients of your work on those activities are your fellow students -- not me. Those activities will have no value to anyone if you complete them too late to provide effective advice to your peers. If you cannot complete an assignment on time, then you can turn in the assignment up to one week late and receive half credit for it—but only if you send me an email message asking for the assignment to be graded late. This is essential because without the email message, I won't know not to use the usual grading procedure. Make sure your email message has a subject line that says, "Please grade my late assignment X", where you replace X with the actual assignment name. Assignments more than one week late will not be graded. GradingLetter grades will be assigned according to the number of points accumulated on activities and exams. The Graded Activities page lists each graded activity along with its points and due date. I want the overall class to earn between a 2.75 and 3.0 grade point average, which is slightly higher than typical for freshman or sophomore classes in the College of Business. Thus, I will not use 90-80-70-60 percent cutoffs to determine final grades. Instead, at the end of finals weeks, after I have finished grading all activities for the term, I will adjust the values until the overall grade point average for the class is between 2.75 and 3.0. The best way to understand this process is to look at how I assigned grades in recent terms. This link leads to the Fall 2006 Excel Gradebook which lets you examine how I calculated grades for students recently. The workbook contains two worksheets: Total and Grades.
Grade Disputes or ErrorsMy graders and I are human, and we are certain to make at least a few mistakes while grading during the term. You are responsible for auditing our grading and asking for adjustments when you think an error has been made. To assist with this process, I will use a mail-merge process to send each student "personalized" messages about your assignments and exams. You will have one week (7 days) to contact me about the grading. Thus, you cannot wait until the end of the term before objecting to grades on early assignments. If you have a simple factual issue with grading, then email is likely to be most appropriate (please see the Using Email section below). If you have questions about subjective issues, or you cannot explain the circumstances thoroughly and clearly through email, then please contact me in person. ExamsHands-on exams will be held in Bexell Hall's basement computer labs, and they will require you to complete various computer tasks. You do not need to bring anything to any of these exams. Practice versions of the exams are available for you to examine now. The practice versions show exactly what students in a prior terms were required to complete. This term's class will teach about newer software, and the format of the exam is likely to improve as well. But if you want a quick way to see an example of the skills you will be required to master, then take a good look at the practice exams.
AccommodationsIf you have a documented disability and need accommodations, have emergency medical information that I should know, or need special arrangements in the event of evacuation, please talk with me as early as possible. I want to make sure your experience in this class is appropriate for your needs. The university-approved legal boilerplate with regard to students with disabilities is:
Academic Honesty
Copyrights and plagiarism
Using Email -- Professional BehaviorI want to encourage you to communicate with me through e-mail. If you decide to send me a message, you must compose it with care and attention. We all make mistakes in spelling and grammar when sending email, but you should remember people will form opinions about your mental abilities based on how you write. Sending a poorly worded or blooper-filled message to a professional colleague is similar to meeting the colleague dressed in dirty clothes with poor hygiene. Email doesn't work well for some types of issues. First, it rarely works well for resolving differences of opinion. Face-to-face negotiations are more likely to work well at that. As an example, if you are upset with something I've done and want to change my behavior, do not write an emotional message stating how rotten I've have been. Instead of flaming through email, try talking in person. Second, email is not good at answering technical questions ... especially if you don't really understand what is going wrong. If you have that sort of question, come to the help sessions or drop by my office. I receive a lot of email, so to manage the volume efficiently and reliably, I want you to follow these simple standards when sending me messages:
If you violate the standards described above, I will either require you to either:
Repeated violations will affect your course grade. |
This website was created and is maintained by
Dave Sullivan. |
to give credit for material prepared by others. This
is particularly true when you build your website project, edit wiki
pages, and write an essay during the midterm exam.