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First, 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 about database management systems.
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 the prerequisite 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.
I split the BA271 class into two parts this term: lectures and lab sessions.
| Section | Time | Day |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | 12:00 - 12:50 p.m. | Tuesday/Thursday |
| 12 | 1:00 - 1:50 p.m. | Tuesday/Thursday |
| 13 | 2:00 - 2:50 p.m. | Tuesday/Thursday |
| 14 | 3:00 - 3:50 p.m. | Tuesday/Thursday |
| help session | 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. | Thursday |
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.
Few people learn to swim from a textbook. Similarly, you should not expect a textbook to teach you how to use a computer well. Most 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.
The undo 
and redo
buttons are your
friends. Always work with a backup file in case a mistake damages your work or
erases your original file altogether.
The Web and email will be the primary sources of assignments and information.
 
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New Perspectives on Microsoft
Office Access 2003- Introductory
Joseph J. Adamski, Kathy Finnegan |
For the latter half of the class, we will use Microsoft Office Access 2003, Introductory, written by Joseph Adamski and Kathleen Finnegan, published by Course Technology (Thomson Learning) on December 11, 2003. Note that this is not the most current version of the textbook. The most current version has different exercises -- but all the same basic instructions about how to use Microsoft Access. It sells for a bunch more than the older version, so I stuck with the older version.
One of your colleagues asks: "Any objection to buying the second edition of the text for this term?"
My reply: "The second edition is virtually identical to the first edition -- except that they wrote a whole new set of back-of-chapter exercises. Since you will be working through the first edition's back-of-chapter exercises, I have to recommend buying the (typically) cheaper first edition."
I want to encourage you to consider buying a copy of the textbook on-line. Numerous on-line alternatives exist, but one of the best is to buy your textbook directly from a student who took BA271 last term. I encouraged my Fall term students to place free classified ads on the OSU Bookstore website. For example, on December 16, 2005, I went to the OSU Bookstore website, clicked on [Textbooks], [Sell Your Textbooks], [Used Book Classifieds], and [Browse]. Then I searched for Adamski as the author, pulling up this page with 26 listings:
Here is a listing of the price and availability of the five lowest-prices used versions of this textbook that I downloaded on December 16, 2005 from www.Amazon.com.
| Price | Condition | Seller Information | ||||
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$20.00 
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Like New |
Seller:
paulab902 (Safe buying
guarantee) Rating: 
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days; Ships from FL, United States. Expedited shipping available. See shipping rates Comments: No marks or tears. |
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$21.00 |
Like New |
Seller:
carolinafarfan (Safe buying
guarantee) Rating: 
100% positive ratings over the past twelve months (3
ratings). Seller has
3 lifetime ratings. Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days; Ships from FL, United States. Expedited shipping available. See shipping rates |
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$21.00 |
Good |
Seller:
semiglia02 (Safe buying
guarantee) Rating: 
33% positive ratings over the past twelve months (3
ratings). Seller has
3 lifetime ratings. Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days; Ships from FL, United States. Expedited shipping available. See shipping rates Comments: some highlighting. |
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$23.00 |
Like New |
Seller:
iluvclcr (Safe buying
guarantee) Rating:
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days; Ships from VA, United States. Expedited shipping available. See shipping rates Comments: practically brand new- no highlighting or markings and shows virtually no use! buy with confidence! |
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$24.99 |
Good |
Seller:
michaelparks5 (Safe buying
guarantee) Rating:
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days; Ships from CA, United States. See shipping rates Comments: Some bent pages, but overall condition is good. Shipping withing 48 hours of payment rec'd. |
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The best way to learn tennis or other sports is to practice, practice, and practice. It turns out that building healthy computing skills is similar. You need to practice enough that you spend your time thinking about what you want to accomplish rather than how to give commands. Along these lines, I will only require you to complete a few of the exercises in the textbook, but you are encouraged to do more of them. If you visit the Thompson Course Technology website, you will be able to download data files needed to complete the other exercises.
I put a copy of the Access 2003 textbook on reserve in the library. Its call number is VR 208.
Some 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.
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.
Assignments 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 UserID (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:
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then your work is not in the correct location, the harvesting program will not find it, and you will not receive credit for your assignment until it is placed in the correct location. If it is moved to the correct location later, you will not receive more than half-credit for the assignment. Do not let this happen. Figure out what is wrong and fix it prior to the due date.
If your assignment is at the wrong location of the network, then:
For most assignments, a grader will examine your work and enter scores and possibly some comments into a grade book program. Once all the grades have been entered for an activity, I will either use Microsoft Word's mail-merge abilities to send everyone in the class a "personalized" email message 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.
Assignments up to one week late receive half credit—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 will grade whatever the harvesting program captures (if anything), so you must tell us 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.
Letter 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 roughly a 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 roughly 3.0.
The best way to understand this process is to look at how I assigned grades in recent terms. This link to the Spring 2005 Excel gradebook and this link leads to the Fall 2005 Excel gradebook. These workbooks let you examine how I calculated grades for students recently. Each workbook contains two worksheets: Total and Grades.
Because life is full of unexpected events, I will let you completely foul up one assignment without penalty. I don't care what the problem might happen to be: a death in the family, absolute confusion about how to complete the assignment, or simply sleeping through the assignment's due-date cut-off time. This adjustment will not affect your exam scores because the hands-on exams are the best single indicator that I receive about how well you can use a computer. To understand how I will make this adjustment, open the Spring 2005 Excel Workbook or Fall 2005 Excel gradebook and look at the Adjustment column on the Total page. It uses a formula similar to:
=MAX($E$234-E218,$G$234-G218,$H$234-H218,$I$234-I218,$J$234-J218,$L$234-L218,$M$234-M218,$N$234-N218,$O$234-O218,$P$234-P218,$Q$234-Q218,0)
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.
My 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.
Hands-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.
In prior terms I gave in-class quizzes during the evening lecture sections. This term I will replace those quizzes with multiple choice questions on the midterm and final exam. Thus, the practice versions of the exam will not contain a section of multiple-choice questions, but the actual exams will contain multiple-choice questions. The purpose of these questions will be to test your understanding of how the hands-on assignments and exams fit within the broader computing field. The best way to study for these questions will be to attend the evening lectures.
This exam will be graded in a rather unusual way. First, I will give everyone a raw score based on their actual work. This raw score will be primarily for your personal information and will not directly affect your class grade. Next, I will adjust the raw score for anyone who did worse than average. This will boost those raw scores up to the class median score. Finally, I will add the adjusted score along with all other graded activities to arrive at total points and determine the final class grade. Why use such a convoluted procedure? I don't want people who get off to a poor start to be unfairly penalized based on prerequisite materials, yet I want everyone to have a bit of incentive to do their best.
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.
If 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:
Accommodations are collaborative efforts between students, faculty and Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD). Students with accommodations approved through SSD are responsible for contacting the faculty member in charge of the course prior to or during the first week of the term to discuss accommodations. Students who believe they are eligible for accommodations but who have not yet obtained approval through SSD should contact SSD immediately at 737-4098.
Much of what you learn in this course will be through interactions with other students. As you will often teach each other, it is difficult to draw the line between getting legitimate outside assistance and outright cheating. Students who receive too much assistance ultimately cheat themselves by not attaining the computer skills needed in their college careers and the competition for jobs.
Despite the preceding disclaimer, you are to do your own work on all activities and exams. Direct or indirect use of student work from previous terms to complete your exams or assignments is a violation of academic honesty. If you turn in all or part of someone else's work as your own or allow someone else to turn in your work as theirs, then you have committed a violation of academic honesty and will be dealt with in accordance with regulations of the University. Possible penalties include a failing grade for the work in question, a failing grade for the course, and suspension from the College or University. If you would like to know more about how this works, I recommend reading more about the University's Office of Student Conduct.
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. This is particularly true when you build your website project, edit wiki pages, and write an essay during the midterm exam. I am less concerned about providing proper citations when you complete the initial Treasure Hunt activity: feel free to copy images or short text passages into that exercise without completing a bibliography or inserting footnotes.
I wrote this note to all BA271 students after the Fall 2005 midterm exam:
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.
- (The rest of the note described how students could revise their essays before I would grade them).
I want to encourage students to communicate with me through e-mail during the term. If you decide to send me a message, I'd like you to consider the care and attention you should give to email messages sent in a professional context. 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. Poor grammar and spelling in an email message is similar to meeting colleagues 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 a video conference instead.
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:
I received this message from a concerned student who overlooked some of the instructions on an Access assignment, and as a result, he received a 2-point deduction from his assignment score:
I do not know if this is your grading scale or your TA's, but to deduct 2 points, 13.3%, because of "poor layout" is irrational and uncalled for. I and several classmates agree that to deduct that many points for such an opinionated choice, not only on this assignment but all of the previous assignments, is unreasonable. You must keep in mind that this is an intoductory [sic] course to Access and you seem to grade the course as if we are all experts with the programs taught in this class. I kept my opinions to myself when you gave me a C on my website, due to font styles, and color choice, but I just wanted to let you know that you are being an unfair professor when it comes to the grading scale. I thought we were graded on what was taught and learned in class, not how we use the skills and how to think.
My first reaction was to laugh because the last sentence is funny to an educator's ear. It bears repeating:
"I thought we were graded on what was taught and learned in class, not how we use the skills and how to think." [Emphasis added]
Now compare that sentence with the overall BA271 course objective listed at the top of the BA271 Home Page:
"... you will have to show us first-rate computer-usage skills combined with an ability to think clearly and write well." [Emphasis added]
So why have I put this student's email flame in the Syllabus section of the BA271 website? Because we all need to consider how this sort of message is likely to be received. Like all email flames, this message rants and raves about someone else's behavior. Will this make the recipient feel like compromising? Is it a way to build healthy interpersonal relationships? These questions are really important to consider before clicking "Send" -- especially if you were angry while writing the message.
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This website was created and is maintained by
Dave Sullivan. |
