J. Howard BAKER
Description:
After teaching the advanced spreadsheet course as a traditional classroom course for a number of years at a major university in Louisiana, it was decided to prototype a blended course, with a considerable portion of the course offered via distance education. A blended course is taught partly as a traditional classroom course and partly as a distance course.The traditional three-semester hour advanced spreadsheet course has been required of all accounting majors for a number of years, and is often taken by Computer Information Systems majors and minors as an elective course. Students majoring in other disciplines such as math, finance, and computer science also enroll in the course as a general or business elective.The prerequisite course is a three semester hour course covering basic computer literacy and the Microsoft Office suite. It is expected that students taking the advanced spreadsheet course have already achieved a mastery of Excel roughly equivalent to that of the Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) Core level exam. With the change of the course to a blended format, new teaching options and technologies open up. For instance, students will be allowed to schedule private sittings for exams rather than having to take exams in an assigned class period. Training assignments via the Web will now be done at the student’s convenience, so long as they are completed by a cutoff date. Students may use on-line assessment tools to evaluate their progress at any time.