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Ask Slashdot: How To Ask College To Change Intro To Computing?
First time accepted submitter taz346 writes "I got a Bachelor's degree 30 years ago, but I recently started back to college to get an Associate's degree. Most of the core courses are already covered by my B.A. but one that I didn't take way back when was Introduction to Computing. I am taking that now but have been very disappointed to find that it is really just Introduction to Microsoft Office 2010. That's actually the name of the (very expensive) textbook. It is mindless, boring and pretty useless for someone who's used PCs for about 20 years. But beyond that, why does it have to be all about MS Office and nothing else? Couldn't they just teach people to create documents, etc., and let them use any office software, like Libre Office? It seems to me that would be more useful; students would learn how to actually create things on their computers, not just follow step-by-step commands from a dumbed-down book about one piece of increasingly expensive software. I know doing it the way they do now is easy for the college, but it's not really teaching students much about what they can do with computers. So when the class is over, I plan to write a letter to the college asking them to change the course as I suggested above. I'm not real hopeful, but what the heck. Do folks out there have any good suggestions as to what might be the most persuasive arguments I can make?"
We learned Claris Works... get the credits and get over it. Your experience is much more valuable than a cheap course, use it.
Tomorrow is another day...
Is that a lot of CSci depts (particularly at community colleges and other places that have associate's degrees) across the country have received grant money from Microsoft itself. That will, of course, make it much more difficult for you to convince them to stop "teaching" Microsoft Office.
I would highly recommend you look into that possibility before you start writing a letter, because if that is the case at your school then you'll just be tilting at windmills.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Take it in Summer session, online. ~5-8 weeks depending on the school. Easy peasy.
For most of the country an intro to Office 2010 is all they need to know about computers. College should prepare them for future employment. If you're complaining about other alternatives, realize the course wasn't targeted at you.
If you can do it in MS Office you learned enough to be able to do in Libre.
My college has "Prior Learning Assessment". If you already know the stuff, they will test you and you can be exempted from taking the class.
Don't waste your time on a worthless class if you can avoid it.
I just graduated with an associates degree last year, and the way I see it is if you're going to anything but a proper university, none of the courses will have any real merit to them. College has become a shitty business, more or less, and you're very unlikely to get anything out of it that you couldn't have done on your own. Particularly when it comes to computers.
Your choices for the moment are either challenge the course, and get an easy credit by exam so you can take something else (and therefore get your degree faster), or suck it up, work hard to get the easy A, and pad your GPA so it doesn't suffer so much when you get to the actual hard stuff.
I strongly agree that other things should be taught, but the point of most "intro to computers" courses at this point is to prepare people to use basic productivity software to complete the rest of their coursework. The name of the course is very misleading, but that's the state of things, and as far as preparing people for the "real world", Microsoft Office is what's still in use in most businesses, so it's more a practical decision than a conspiracy.
If you go to a temp agency these days, you'll learn exactly how poorly trained many people still are in computer skills. When I took the test on Excel, Beginner level was "Launch Excel, create a new document, save it, close Excel." Because I knew how to do a =SUM formula, I was automatically considered expert. I'd never used Access in my life, but because I knew how to alt+tab out of the test & use the help file in the actual program on the testing machine, I was told that I "already surpassed the skills being tested." As someone who has been in the IT workforce 20 years already, the Intro to Computing course isn't targeted at you. At all. It's meant for the idiots just out of high school who can barely spell or have paid their smart friends to do their word processing for them. Also, "intro" classes of any kind are not the classes that are designed to teach you to think. They're the ones designed to brute force feed you a truckload of information that you build on in the 200 level class next semester - and with computing classes, it's intended to teach you what programs you'll have freely available on campus in the labs or be required to use in classrooms.
One argument is that since there's now a computer in everything, a modern intro to computers class should probably be diversified to cover a lot more than using a PC. It could almost be an "intro to modern life" class. Some topics for the syllabus might be:
Setting up a home network, including a FIOS/DSL router or a cable modem and a Tivo/DVR with a a cable card. Options for mobile computing/e-mail. Password strategies. Controlling what you share on social networks. Transferring files around between PC/smart phone/tablet/digital camera/etc. Keeping an offsite backup of important data. etc. etc.
As other posts mentioned, this course was not aimed at you. Just try to get what you can out of it.
I have to agree with the school on this one; this sounds like a useful course for the person with no computer skills, who will not be going into I.T.
Teaching "Libre Office" would not be as useful to the majority of people who may be going into a professional office job where they will most likely be using MS, not Libre, Office. Likewise, this is more practical than a course that taught the history of computing, or "ones and zeros," for people actually looking for work.
Finally, re. the "...expensive textbook..."
They're all expensive. Welcome to college!
What does a credit hour cost?
How many students are going to be ripped off? What percentage of those already learned this in high school or junior high?
It's institutionalized theft. I'm amazed you are so sanguine about it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
One does not simply walk into the Dean's office and request changes.
One must contribute a building....or something.
Or for that matter, just asking the CS department if you can skip the class because you already know the basics? If you find a prof and can convince him or her that you already know this, you can probably skip the class.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
> Manipulating tables in Access is also a good precursor to working with real SQL.
Your entire response was just so full of fail but this one especially takes the cake.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When I was supposed to take that class (10 years ago), we were given the option to "test out" and forgo the expense of the class and textbook.
Sure, smart people listen to positive suggestions. Explain to them how most businesses now use non microsoft products. err, wait.
Try to explain how Linux will become the desktop of the future, as it is a new movement just started. err, wait.
Try to explain how Apple Mac products will save them a ton of money by providing less expensive hardware choices that can be easily upgraded. Err, wait.
Ok, try this; threaten them.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Your university teaches MS Office because that's what the businesses that hire their students want them to teach. What you're suggesting would be like a company coming to the school and saying "We want graduates that can program fluent Java" and the school gives them graduates who only write C#. Sure, they're very similar languages and they do the same thing, have the same general set of features, but the implementation is different and when those graduates get to their new job, surprise surprise, they need to learn a different syntax and discover the little differences between both languages that they weren't taught in class.
Be grateful that you're smart enough to go out there and experience the alternatives. Some people will do the bare minimum to get by - learn Office, pass the test, and forget it all. They'll have trouble when they get out into the job world and are faced with some new feature in Office they didn't learn, or get sat down in front of a whole new office suite and not know where to start.
However, it seems that you may also mean "change the course to not just be about office suites". In that case, by all means, propose that they rename the course and/or restructure it to focus more on the concepts surrounding general computing. Either they'll accept your suggestion or they won't. It doesn't hurt to try.
Ridiculous troll post is ridiculous.
Money. Become a wealthy alumnus and, when contacted about a donation, bring up your criticism of this course.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'd simply point out that UK high schools have surpassed their intro course and ask them at what point they plan to give you a better education in computers than a foreign government can give its kids.
;-)
If you really wanted to go the extra mile and spend a little bit of money on this "letter" you could buy a small SD flash card and spend $25 on a Raspberry Pi and work through this tutorial as you work through your intro course. Then when you're done you can get the Raspberry Pi to start and have the sole purpose be to display your letter to the staff. Just mail them the Raspberry Pi, the flash card, a USB to USB Micro cord and a short HDMI cable. Just write instructions to plug it into a USB port and monitor then in the letter explain how you used the GNU Toolchain and wrote the rest of this code yourself. It might be too much for some of the other students but it was cheaper than the textbook. If you can do it then your once great alma mater is selling its students short.
A letter can be crumpled up and thrown away. A Raspberry Pi can as well but I guarantee it's going to hurt like hell
My work here is dung.
A bajillion years ago when I went to college we had an intro to computer course that was the same kind of thing. How to send e-mail, use word and maybe something else like that. I ended up failing the class because I was so bored I never went.
I went to the head of my department, explained what happened and asked if I could take a higher level course and count that as the Intro to Computing credits. He took a look at the course description of the new class I wanted to take, he approved it, I got an A, credits satisfied, case closed.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Couldn't they just teach people to create documents, etc., and let them use any office software, like Libre Office?
In a word, not really. They COULD teach you to create documents in Libre Office. Or they could teach you to create them in Word, in Notepad, in vi, or any other random product. BUT I would expect they don't really have time to teach you how to "create documents, etc" and then let you use ANYTHING. Because you know, all those different products work differently.
The teacher needs to take something, and teach you how to use that. The teacher doesn't have time to teach you the same thing in other products. Teaching one of the most widely used pieces of software in an "Intro" course seems like a pretty good thing to do.
Can you ask them to change it? Sure. But you need to be much more descriptive on how they can change it, and make sure you understand what the average person, who doesn't know anything about computers, should learn.
Also keep in mind that Office is the currently the #1 word processing software out there. Most people will end up using that in the workforce. But if they don't they'll use a product that copies Office.
Of course, you could use it as an excuse to hit on girls who are 30 years younger than you...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I had the same thought when going through the same class. I was hoping to simply test out of it -- ended up compromising with the professor and was able to get all of the class material ahead of time (finished it within two days) but had to take the tests on test days (which I assume is understandable to minimize cheating).
A prior learning assessment would have been nice but atleast it got me out of having to attend every class session.
For your goal on attempting to change the course contents -- yah, good luck .. I'm assuming Microsoft is still pouring a LOT of $$$ into the colleges to make sure their software is being used -- definitely very annoying as other software choices are more than adequate and would require learning concepts vs following step-by-step directions (nothing more frustrating than watching someone pull out a step-by-step instruction sheet and have absolutely NO clue what is actually happening within the program to give them their results).
Course should really be about hardware. They can then build up to software. Knowing how memory works, device drivers, etc. would be good. A+ certification for new IT students, who should later move on to servers and networking, IMHO.
I would think an "introduction to computing" course would start with the basics, such as how to use the mouse, how to double-click, how to right click, how to select and drag, how to copy and paste, how the filesystem works (and where files go when you download them, please not the desktop), and so on.
Follow that with how create and unpack compressed archives, how to copy files, how to burn a CD, how to backup and restore, and how and why to avoid logging in as administrator. It's unfortunate that these are considered to be advanced topics, when they really ought to be taught early.
Once you've learned all that, then you can progress on to task-specific software, such as MS-Office.
One reason people have so many problems with computers and they ask us for help is because they don't learn these things in the right order.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I hate to say it, but going to college for CS these days is akin to attending a 4 year long Microsoft sales seminar.
...communicate with other Windows PC using Microsoft Office.
That sucks but it's the truth. Teaching anything different to MOST students wouldn't be productive use of THEIR time.
That lovely Cengage book with the expensive SAM code and annoying "read the book do book exercises do SAM 2010 exercises then test" could have been reduced to a less-profitable DVD and SAM 2010 access for tests only, but such is life.
Take the course online, get the credit, move on with life. Student aid is paying my way so a fuck I do not give. Office 2010 and Windows 7 run fine in Virtualbox (if you want audio on a Linux host use a 64-bit host with appropriate Virtualbox version) so no problem.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"but the point of most "intro to computers" courses at this point is to prepare people to use basic productivity software to complete the rest of their coursework."
Bingo! We have an Insightful winner.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
My funds were pretty limited when I was in college so luckily I was allowed to test out of the Intro to Computing class (which, like yours, was basically an Office primer stretched to fill a semester). It cost far less, got me full credit for the course, and I didn't have to blow $100+ on books.
Lookup E115 at NC State University for Engineering Students:
http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/e115/
1 credit hour course with pass / fail option. Students who have the knowledge can take the exam at the beginning of their first semester and skip the course entirely. Other groups (Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Agricultural and Life Sciences, etc.) offer a similar course tailored for their students. Textbook was custom-made and cost less than $20.
In short, you won't win the argument to have an "introduction to computing" class any less generalized. You can, however, recommend significant improvements in course material based on what peer colleges/universities are doing. AND, further, if you want to DESIGN said courses tailored to a diverse student population and each populations unique requirements, I don't see a Dean turning down the opportunity to at least listen to somebody who is passionate about their coursework and can offer constructive feedback.
Best of luck if you decide to pursue it that far.
When I was taking courses for my associate degree for information technology, I had to take a similar bullshit course for MS Orifice.. er.. Office.
I asked several of the school administrators why such a clearly nonsense class was required for (what at the time) was a fairly hard-core curriculum featuring CISCO CCNA certification training, A+&Network+ cert training, Novell Netware cert training, Database Programming, and general programming courseware.
The answer, was that they had been pressured into it, because of requirements for in-house tech staff to be more than just proficient with MS's offerings, but be sufficiently fluent in the packages that they can provide quick and rapid responces to support questions from less technical office workers.
Essentially, they need/want you to be able to "help" the vacuous "office marys" out there tha can't quite remember how to use the mail/merge feature, despite using it EVERY SINGLE DAY.
(Compare, that would be like a programmer not remembering how to use a macro, or how to call a library, THAT THEY WROTE, and use every day-- and need a programming specialist to help them debug their output... because of their abysmal level of incompetence.)
Really, in that light, the requirement to have MS's office suite s an intro level class makes sense, in a horrible and twisted way.
More sense would be to have a competency test for office workers, but that would exclude a considerable number of office staff that are employed due to nepotism. Instead, and expensive support network is required to ensure that such employees are halfass productive.
If there’s any industry willing to quash innovation and progress to save its stodgy existence, it’s book publishing. Sales reps have become incredibly adept at the care and feeding of the university faculty that they depend upon to adopt their books. even private industrial leaders and economic pragmatists like Alan Greenspan have begun to criticize the decline of traditional liberal arts education and the rise of the corporate university as economically and socially disastrous.
Good luck on your quest.
The Slashdot crowd is going to rave that this course should be about hardware, or computer fundamentals, or at least include open-source alternatives. But I disagree: this class does need to exist, so the elderly, the disadvantaged, and the recently immigrated can get some basic workplace skills. It could use a different name, but the content is important. And yes, it does have to be Office. Teaching anything else would be like teaching typing on Dvorak keyboards.
The problem isn't the class, it's that the submitter is required to take it. He/she should be able to get out of it by talking to an advisor, or taking a placement test, or something. Shame on his/her school for being so inflexible.
If you go to a temp agency these days, you'll discover how many people are poorly trained in: expressing coherent thought in writing, basic arithmetic, and professional interpersonal interaction. Partly, that's why they're at a temp agency, partly, it's the old George Carlin line:
Think about somebody you know who has an IQ of 100. Now, realize that 50% of the world is dumber than this person.
This is not an Intro to computer class. This is an Intro to Microsoft Office class.
There is a BIG DAMNED DIFFERENCE.
When I went to college, there were no computers. Well, no personal computers. We had a "computer center" where we could submit Fortran programs on punched cards.
Anyway, I found a few odd room sized computers tucked away in various corners (IBM 1620 and DEC PDP-8) and used these as personal computers to learn to program.
Word processing, spreadsheets, etc. all came later and I just learned these as they came along.
The point... if you have to take an introductory course in how to use MS Office, they are wasting your time.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Explain how this is false?
I get it, 4 digit UID, you must be a database god.
But lets be real here. You didn't jump straight out of the womb into calculus. You stepped on stones to get where you are. For many, Access is that stone that introduces them to databases and SQL. For better or worse, it is one of the most accessible database tools around.
Q: Whoever wrote the syllabus for this class is a total idiot who has no idea what "Introduction to Computing" should be about. What can I do about it?
A. LOL. If you have that kind of messiah complex, I suggest you start with something easy, like ending world hunger.
At my school, the introduction to computer science course is essentially an introduction to the computer science curriculum: mathematical logic, computer programming, computer architecture, and a bit of theoretical computer science (discrete mathematics and computability). In addition to this course, there are several 1-credit courses (usually each course is 3 credits) that cover specific languages -- everything from C to Javascript. The school recently switched from Java to Python as an introductory language, but the higher-level courses frequently choose languages that are suitable to the subject -- software engineering is taught in Java to teach object-oriented design principles while courses like parallel programming are taught in IBM's X10 programming language since it is developed specifically for writing distributed software. So my advice is not to try to convince the school to do something different -- each school, after all, caters to its student population -- but rather to do a little research into the curriculum of the school and make that the basis for choosing which to attend.
There are people who ACTUALLY do not know how to turn on PCs....giving them choice of software is not the primary concern, nor is teaching office the primary goal...it is learning to use a PC by way of using a meaningful software product to prepare them for collage work.
Most colleges and universities offer these sorts of "service courses"; a sort of out-sourcing of expertise from one (or more) department(s) to another.
They are often required by students of non-CompSci degrees in order to become familiar with the basic software in use by their respective departments, in order to permit those departments to focus more time on teaching the material, and not the software.
Many faculties/departments have very exacting standards for how reports are formatted (i.e.: APA formatting and citations), or require Excel and/or Access experience due to their use in their faculties for data retention/organization/statistical analysis. Never mind that computing may have better solutions for these -- many of the professors in these departments aren't interested in computing, have a good knowledge of MS Office, and use it as a golden hammer to fit all their needs. They're interested in furthering their research, and not learning other toolsets. They want the students working under them to have a basic knowledge of the same tools as again, their purpose isn't to teach general purpose computing, but to get those students up and running quickly to further their own areas of research.
When I was doing my graduate work, I had several occasions to teach classes such as this (and several that were significantly more advanced). For some of them, we taught basically MS Office, a bit of RDBMS, and a little bit of scripting (Perl). We had other courses teaching C and FORTRAN to students studying other sciences (Physics, Chemistry, etc.). Typically, such courses are restricted such that CS students (and those in related fields of study) are disallowed from taking them, seeing as how they're considered far too basic.
Fortunately, most good schools (particularly if they have a COmputer Science department) do offer more advanced courses which you can take if you so desire. If you already have sufficient expertise in the area at hand, talk to a student advisor about an exemption (many of these courses, where they are mandatory, can be skipped if you can show sufficient proficiency in the subject matter at hand).
Yaz
Look, the school get Office for basically nothing thanks to their campus agreement. They can easily push it out/update it/manage it with software they already have. Why should the put Libra or whatever on there and make the grad students teaching that intro course deal with more things than they need to?
Oh and BTW, yes they need to spend most of the time teaching Office because that the skill 90% of the people in that class need. Maybe the Bohemian Design Studio in Palo Alto won't let filthy Microsoft software touch their hard drives, but most of the people in this course aren't going to have any say in what they're expected to use (nor are they going to give two shits), and it's going to be Office. That's reality.
The real question is, what the fuck are you doing in CS 101? Go talk to your instructor for God's sake and test out of that bitch already. Or at least just show up for the tests.
Since college is just about getting a non burger flipper job they need to train students so the college looks better to HR.
I see nothing wrong with this as its a valuable lesson. What you need to do is gain exception for this. I showed my dean my resume and he laughed and said do not worry about it.
Yes, it is less intense than a 4 year CS or Math degree, where you learn things like mathematical theory, and get exposed to much more advanced problems.
Submitter specifically mentioned an associate degree. I took classes in said associate degree not because I wanted the degree, but because I was interested in the cert training. (The school offered discounted cert testing as part of the course.)
The point was that those benchwarmer classes were leaps and bounds moe "technical" than "how to change the font to bold in MS Word."
Specifically, that AS degree was for a computer support role. That's why the intro to computing was more "wordprocessing", and less "computational theory", which would have been more sensible. (You know, things like "introduction to turing machines", and things like the difference between harvard and von-neuman architectures.)
I am pretty sure it was more on topic than your shit smearing attempt. --no offense intended.
Simple, create a new version of the course, with a textbook that offers 97% PROFIT instead the usual textbook mark up of 95%. They'll flock to it in droves. Especially if the book retails for $200+.
Three Squirrels
But beyond that, why does it have to be all about MS Office and nothing else? Couldn't they just teach people to create documents, etc., and let them use any office software, like Libre Office?
We tried this at the last school I was at. If by the time you get to university you can't create a document in word, you're not going to learn to use libre office in 12 weeks. We have to teach behaviours before we can expect much understanding, and a course textbook that is about MS office is decidedly at the level of giving basic behaviours without underlying principles.
The problem with people who are completely computer illiterate is that high minded ideas about teaching them 'principles' is a step ahead of them, at least by the time they're university or college age. They're scared of breaking anything, and you're jumping the gun asking for more than that.
I know doing it the way they do now is easy for the college, but it's not really teaching students much about what they can do with computers.
Nor is that the point. If the course is a book in Office the class is targeted at people who know next to nothing and trying to get them to the point of accomplishing basic tasks that will be useful in university.
So when the class is over, I plan to write a letter to the college asking them to change the course as I suggested above. I'm not real hopeful
Nor should you be. It's not a good idea. We can seat 400 kids in a class about how to use MS word whereas the next largest CS course is 120, with an entrance class in science of about 6000. Exceptionally basic classes are popular because so many students know next to nothing. The Deans office likes these classes because they put seats in chairs, the other science departments like us because their TA's don't have to cover basic things like how to do bullet points in a document, etc. It's sad, but this is the reality of computer literacy. Complaining to the dean is just going to make you unpopular with the department because you're trying to make people look bad, when absolutely everyone knows how pathetic it is that this is required. But you can't control worldwide highschool curriculum.
Look, I realize you're trying to help. But you're not. You're in the wrong class. It's that simple. If your university/college has an actual computer science programme absolutely no one in that department, who is running the course, thinks this is the level we really want students to be at. But you have to realize we still get foreign students who've never lived with regular electricity, and most of the domestic ones basically open word and start mashing buttons to type, they don't actually know anything. These are exceptionally basic courses because the people coming in are at an exceptionally basic level, and that's the market that needs to be served. It shouldn't be a university level credit, but no one would take it if we only gave a college level credit for it (they have other things to spend time on), and that means it attracts people looking for some free easy marks, there's no way to avoid that, but for the people who actually need this level of material (which is a lot of students, and a lot more who don't even realize they need this level of material) what you're suggesting is completely disconnected from their reality.
Do folks out there have any good suggestions as to what might be the most persuasive arguments I can make?"
Literally the only argument is that students shouldn't need this in the first place, which isn't even true. Everything else is you just living in a bubble of 'first world problems' so to speak.
We, I kid you not, have students majoring in computer science and electrical engineering where I am that grew up without electricity, and their first plane flight was to come here. It's mostly a India/China/Africa thing, but it's rare that someone from China or india hasn't had at le
that's right, College isn't geared for people trying to learn something useful. Instead it's become the place where people go to learn what they should have in High School instead of screwing around with drugs or playing WoW. My College has a required test that if you pass, you don't need to take the Intro to Computers class as it's geared for those that have limited/no access to a computer. Another issue is that college is where folks go to learn job skills instead of the critical thinking skills you need for a PHD/Masters program. The BS/BA has become a joke in this country as it now takes 6 years to complete due to how poor our schools are preparing folks for University and Critical Thinking. Thank you PC folks. Everyone is no longer responsible for their own fate and should look to the "Fatherland" to support and correct them.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Perhaps they are teaching MS Office because people are very likely to use it in whatever office environment they might work in. We can debate the virtues of MS Office vs Libre Office but what is certain is that MS Office is far and away the most popular office package on the market. Maybe MS donated a bunch of software to the university and in return they are teaching courses on it. Who knows? Personally, I'd just take the course credit and move on. Sometimes you've just got to pick your battles ;-)
Just get those + certs off your resume. They are fine for a kid who doesn't know better, but if you are over 20 they route your resume to the trash.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not the "adult diaper" sort. If it's a university, or maybe a college, then this is inappropriate: one would think that the purpose of these institutions is to teach a higher form of abstract thinking. I stress, "one would think." If it's a trade school, then you're expected to know how to function in a typical working environment when you leave. This means, for better or (mostly) worse, MS Office.
I don't know if you can fix it. You can talk with your dean of CS, or the closest approximation, and share your concerns, but he or she probably feels the course content is appropriate. It was selected for some reason.
Like others have said, either test out or take the class and get the easy grade, and then bitch about it. You can always spread word amongst your associates that Podunk U. is not a quality education.
My college has "Prior Learning Assessment". If you already know the stuff, they will test you and you can be exempted from taking the class.
Don't waste your time on a worthless class if you can avoid it.
YMMV, but many schools charge a hefty percentage of the tuition of the class to test out of it.
The cost of higher education in the US is really starting to surpass the benefits. Sure go ahead and post a cite about how the more education you have, the more money you make. But let's consider two things:
1. When are those stats from?
2. How much of that extra income is really worth it when you consider the loans and opportunity costs?
And to head off the "education is more than about a pay check", I agree whole heatedly! Maybe have Liberal Arts and Social and Natural Sciences (Not CS), at least at the undergraduate level, be free or at least at a very steep discount?
Why Liberal Arts and Sciences? Because an undergraduate degree of those degrees aren't worth much and they enrich folks for a better society.
Also, if you don't have a Liberal Arts or Science degree, you have really have vocational degree - you're not educated.
Let's face it: Engineering, CS, Business, and later on Medicine and Law degrees are trade degrees.
The High School that I went to had something like this. I never had to take it however because I was in the magnet program and they shoehorned the test into the first week of the intro CS course.
Fuck Beta
Writing a letter "to the college" usually has little impact. The suggestions usually don't filter down to the right people. From my experience (4 years in University, 3 years in College), the right person to talk to is the department head. While the course professor has some flexibility, he or she isn't likely to be able to change a "How to use MS Office" course into an actual computing course. The department head can instigate broader course changes, with the proper approval from stakeholders and higher ups. Also, I'd suggest talking to the department head if possible instead of writing a letter.
This. If you have to write, the profs will expect real Word files (and while things have improved, .doc files exported from Libre Office or other word processors
still manage to screw up the formatting sometimes).
If you have to submit supporting calculations, the profs will expect real Excel files
(possibly including VBA macros that they provide).
If you have to do presentations, the profs will expect real Powerpoint files.
I'm somewhat surprised that there's no way to test out,
but the real purpose of the class is to try to make sure that everyone has some basic competency
with the tools that are required by the school.
... I *was* a kid at the time. That was the point. This was close to 20 years ago, in the 90s. I don't list them, especially now.
I no longer work in any IT related disciplines, I am a CAD draftsman. It ca be dull and drudgery at times, but that is true of any job. Not having to answer questions because "you're a computer guy, right?" Is well worth it, as is the radically reduced levels of stress.
It would be nonsense to claim those certs on a resume.
It wasn't nonsense to claim them when I was 18. For the submitter, who has been in the industry previously, A+, Network+, and CCNA would be wastes of money and time as well, since vocationally he should have become proficient already, and the cert means nothing. They however, less rediculous than the MS office requirement, for exactly the same reasons. Expecting somebody that has likely *already* been supporting office users vocationally to take an intro to office class is not just silly, it is minbogglingly mindshatteringly silly.
I believe that was the submitter's point, in addition to the obvious that computers are not glorified typewriters.
I have to agree here. Specialisation is for insects!
Tomorrow is another day...
This is pretty much the only correct answer under the article.
On the list of things worth spending time on, a 100-level course's easy-factor is pretty low.
In my opinion, the only approach that's likely to have purchase with anyone in power is simply to be upfront. Don't talk about LibreOffice or Linux or anything; the specific tools that are taught are and should be up to the professor. But explain that simply learning how to use an office software suite is very narrow. Say, "Based on my experience working in an office, I think this course material is very shallow and incomplete. I think it could be improved by covering a more varied range of software and going into more depth on computer basics. After all, most people will use more than just an office suite in their jobs, and would benefit from a deeper understanding of computers in general."
If you like, emphasize that just office-suite knowledge would have been fine some years ago, but nowadays office workers are expected to use software to do pretty much everything, not just create documents. You may also mention that most students are already at least somewhat familiar with office software (everybody who graduates nowadays had to use it in high school), but may not have a good understanding of *computers*, in a general sense.
Yes, it is less intense than a 4 year CS or Math degree, where you learn things like mathematical theory, and get exposed to much more advanced problems.
Planning a network out can get pretty darn complicated, precisely because there isnt a single answer that will make all the numbers add up. Theres also a zillion unknowns, and generally incomplete requirements. Its all down to judgement, critical thinking, and how much of the theory you know.
Not a math major, so I cant speak to the issues they have to deal with, but I have a feeling its a different sort of "difficult".
Without question. When planning a network you need answers to lots of questions that your bosses don't want to /simply cannot answer, like "how many users will be on this segment, and what will they be doing?", combined with the thought of "how many users will be added within the next 10 years, and how will their use case change over that time?"
Usually, you get an answer along the lines of "I dunno" at best and "that's what I hired you for" at worst.
This is what leads to quite a few incorrect assumptions during topology planning that come back to haunt you in horrible, horrible ways down the line, and cause many generations of incumbant administrators to curse you with their dying breaths.
I am not in any way deriding that level of difficulty. Merely pointing out that such difficlty is far greater than "click the bolded B icon to turn on bold."
Subnet planning, collision domain planning, and building topology planning are considerably more technical.
I don't know how your college is structured, but when I was in university there was a faculty student's club where you could easily get in contact with people that knew how to get on course evaluation panels to provide the students' view of things. But of course you could easily talk to lecturers and ask them how that works at your college. You could even ask how offers for new courses should be submitted. Might have to offer to work for free for a semester teaching your view of things. But hey, maybe they'll take the bait and keep you on, who knows.
...is "why is the OP going for an Associates when he already has a Bachelors?"
Did you say 'mindless, boring and pretty useless'?
I beg to differ.
I got my A+ back in '98, was grandfathered into the lifetime cert (suckers =), and it does merit special attention simply because it shows a competency of actually managing your own machine leading to less load for the admin (and the ability to help out when he's backed up or dealing with a complex launch or something).
For those in a large barcode based environment... I'm not talking about your job.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Access is well used in business. In-fact I was turned down from a job just because it did not have Access on my resume even though I was proficient in database and IT support work. It is a great skill to have on a resume if you are a new grad.
http://saveie6.com/
"Couldn't they just teach people to create documents, etc., and let them use any office software, like Libre Office?"
This is precisely like asking why intro typing classes don't teach Dvorak, instead of the current curriculum.
In most jobs, you'll be doing crap work that doesn't matter just like learning MS-Office doesn't matter for many people.
OTOH, knowing what MS-Office is capable of doing **is** a real skill, since 90% of all companies probably use it.
MS-Office skills are worth having, but not as an "intro to computers" course. That implies wider, general knowledge, but also includes MS-Office. Teaching Wordpad, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Amidoc, Lotus-Office, Google-Docs and all the others would be good too.
Tell the teacher that your employer uses Linux, not Windows, so challenge him/her to make the course relevent for you NOW. I assume you can lie, correct?
To make this all go over better, be certain to shave your grey beard off first.
I must admit that at my last corporate job, all 200 UNIX admins all used MS-Office for email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations. They weren't happy about it, but it was just they tools they were required to use to work with the other 120K employees. Even the Linux-centric data security group, who refused to run MS-Windows on any of their machines, setup a terminal server they could RDP into for Visio use.
Get used to it.
And when you are CEO of a company, never buy anything from Microsoft.
(I too have lifetime certs. :D I was very quick to get it before the. A+ 2000 paradigm activated.)
That was a great comment. In this day and age, many people take for granted how much thought and effort goes into curriculum at the college level, or any level for that matter.
If you have any sort of documentation of an industry certification, you might be able to skip some classes. In my case, I had an A+ cert that I had simply taken on my own before attending a community college. Having that allowed me to skip 3 mindless classes. Best $300 I ever spent.
Actually, most schools will have some sort of procedure for obtaining a credit in a course if you already know the material. Some will just have you write the final exam, and if you get 80+% then you are awarded the credit and do not have to take the course.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Sadly many people who enter the workforce are too airheaded to deal with the most rudimentary office tasks despite being adequately trained in whatever they're supposed to be doing. The workforce often demands SPECIFICALLY office or generic office skills. So the college deliver what they want. Actually I used to regularly get vouchers from my company to let struggling users take intro to office at their local community college. Most of the time you can tell they hated working with their computer and probably dreaded coming into work and messing with it, many of them spending more time fighting the machine than actually doing their job. FOR YEARS. It had to be horrible.
Nobody ever collected a voucher even once. Anyhow yeah community colleges deliver what people are demanding their employees to know.
I got my BS degree about the same time as you, maybe a few years earlier.
My very first course using computers was a FORTRAN class, and we used punch cards. It was a lot of fun and very interesting! I wouldn't trade that class for "introduction to Microsoft Office" for anything. We got to feed our cards to an IBM 370, an awesome looking machine that was probably inferior to today's cell phones as far as computing power.
Way back when, while attending the University of Illinois (major: Computing Engineering), I wanted to take a junior-level CS course as a freshman. (CS306, to be exact, taught by Gillies.) In order to take the course, I had to satisfy the prerequisites. So I took the exams for the FORTRAN and ASSEMBLER courses. My advisor encouraged me to blow through the two lower courses: "I don't want you getting bored." Both exams were a piece of cake because I had been programming in both languages, plus PL/I, for two years in high school. (Funny story: for the ASSEMBLER course, the final exam was prepared by the professor, and the teaching assistants took the test with the students, to help set the curve. I missed one question, the TAs missed the same question plus one additional question, so I ended up setting the curve. The other members of the class were not amused.)
I was accepted into the CS306 class, and ended up teaching the first two weeks, because I was the only person in the classroom -- the teaching assistants included -- who knew PL/I cold, and PL/I was the languages used for the machine simulator. I also helped debug the simulator. I also was a "group of one" (the standard was to have three-people teams for the term project) because the professor thought that anyone who was on my team would not benefit. So I ran solo. And freely consulted to the other teams, with the professor's blessing and strict limitations on the kind of help I could provide.
(Calculus proved to be my downfall. Long story. Even the Dean of Engineering became involved, but the damage had been done. After working for a corporation for two years, I used the corporate tuition reimbursement program and went to junior college -- and aced all four calculus courses, all the way through Differential Equations. I just needed the right preparation.)
Shit classes like this probably won't even exist there, and if they do they won't be required.
If you're paying more than $30 for an MS Office book you're being overcharged. This sounds like a hardcover that's being sold in place of $20 books from the ...for Dummies series, the Absolute Beginner's Guide to series, and the Idiot's Guide to... series. Accuse this professor of making too much money off of his bookstore kickbacks (which are legal but students should hate) and next time get your education from another place or just the book.
I'm LostCluster but I lost my password to that user. Hey Slashdot, how about helping me get it back!
Ya I was on the undergrad curriculum committee, between the squabbling over C++/Java or C# and trying to figure out how basic we can make a course on 'how to use MS word' it wasn't a good time. All of the interesting stuff, in third and 4th year, is pretty much up to the professor, so you don't get a lot of say in that from committees (and committees don't react fast enough to be suitable for senior topics anyway).
Just hack into their network and edit the course descriptions to suite.
Preferably just before they go to press with the school course catalog (if they still do the whole dead-tree thing).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I think an intro to computing should be the Adobe CS suite. not MS office. Most computers have MS office, but all of the principals in adobe are backward compatible, I would think. but then I use OpenOffice so what would I know.
Bullshit. I learned SQL 17 years ago using Access. You setup the query in the QBE grid and then click the SQL button/tab and see what your query looks like in SQL. Pretty soon you write the queries in SQL and then move to SQL Server and stored procedures, triggers, indexes, etc. Access won't make you a superstar DBA but it's a great entry point.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
FWIW, really basic computer literacy a problem in most adults also. Many seem to memorize the absolute basic routine that requires the least amount of thought and nothing more, if they don't work directly in a computer-related field. I remember some discussion at work of a required "use MS Office 2010" course for adults who were using earlier versions of Office, that was given to adults at my workplace of the time; in the exam they were asked to print something for submission, and a tonne of them had problems because they couldn't locate the print button, never having used it in class before that point. My suggestion, hearing about this problem afterward, of "ctrl+P", was treated almost as black magic or rocket science.
Intro to Computing courses are an intelligence test. If you can't figure out how to credit your way out of them, you fail the test and receive the punishment ;)
FWIW, really basic computer literacy a problem in most adults also.
Without a doubt.
I understand where the questioner is coming from, people know behaviours, not understanding, so the panic at things like the ribbon because they have to actually learn to use something new. But at the same time, muddying the issue with trying to teach understanding is beyond a lot of these students (at this stage). Walking before running sort of thing.
And OMG it's my single least favorite class to teach. Here's reason #1: even concentrating solely on MS products, with step-by-step instructions and illustrated UI tutorials, most of the class (associate's degree program at a community college) finds it basically impossible to follow along. Ask them a conceptual question on a test and they go semi-beserk. Ask them to compute a number of bytes in something as an exercise and they groan in despair. Give an assignment in Excel and the whole class copies the file from the one guy who figured it out (frequently not even changing his name).
The level of skill in a class like that is so low that you probably wouldn't believe it. Suggested starting point for your project -- Ask 3 random fellow students to show you their work for the next assignment. Having considered their output, ask yourself honestly if they will be capable of a higher level of abstraction with a different application and a different UI. Hint: These will be the same people who can't pass a rudimentary algebra course, because they can't wrap their head around "x" being an abstraction for a number (this being about half of all students in community colleges in the U.S.).
I've been told that the school I'm at will be simply dropping the course entirely at some point in the future, which I think is probably great because it's irredeemable. In any case, at least I don't teach it anymore which solves the #1 pain my ass in my teaching position in the last few years. Good riddance. There is absolutely, positively no way you can make any suggestion for change in the direction you suggest and have it be taken up.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"Either they'll accept your suggestion or they won't. It doesn't hurt to try."
I guarantee you it's 100% wasted effort and time.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Many "Introduction to Computing" classes are less about content and more about being able to guarantee common knowledge. Within the MS Office suite (not my choice for common knowledge) are many common menus and shortcuts used across Windows applications. This may be a foundation for activities and projects to come. Personally, I believe computing background (historical) and nomenclature along with simple, proof of concept programs can help a potential computer science engineer decide correctly on an educational path. Most people I've spoken to told me they knew early on they weren't cut out to be a programmer.
Introduction to computers? Who hasn't been introduced to computers by the time you reach college?
College is simply a method to keep unproductive workers off the unemployment rolls and in their parents health care system. Once you are there you are expected to complete your liberal social.democratic certification and commence with the resistribution of wealth. Starting with your own, or your parents. AFTERWARDS, you can default on your debts and work for the government, or a school for the rest of.your life
A small price to pay for using office for a few hours a week.
Rich republicans on the other hand, drop out of school, screw around in their garage for a few years, invent useless crap like PC'S and websites. Years later they spend the rest of dad's fortune building -- colleges.
You've got your bachelors, why waste time with an associates? Wouldn't your time/money be better spent pursuing a Masters, or even some more in-depth certifications? Typically courses in an associates program are going to have low level course material, and are meant for beginners. Definitely not geared toward experienced professionals (in any field). As a hiring manager, I'd really question why (with your experience) you would go after this.
If you've been using computers for 20 years, you shouldn't need to take "Intro to computers". :P
Really, Intro to computers could be one of two types of courses:
1. Focus on superficial use of operating system for end user and common productivity main apps.
This is what you are getting, it seems like. Learning MS Office sucks, I agree, but if you learn MS Office, then WordPerfect, OpenOffice, etc. are not far away. This is basically what Apple teaches for their OS/apps at their in-store "courses" too, although it seems they do a better job
This isn't really "Intro to computers", so much as "Intro to MS Office". That's fine, but they should name the course that way.
2. Focus on computers in general, the history of computing, how computers work (electronically), parts they typically contain, etc. - and not focus on the implementation of a specific OS.
This is what people who have used computers and MS Office, but might not know much about how they actually work or the history behind them.
I think that for people without the knowledge, both #1 and #2 should be taught. The problem is that, High-Schools and colleges might not have the resources to teach both to everyone. For non computer majors, #1 is more important for them to know in order to complete the other courses and work in the real world.
Many schools have a partnership with Microsoft. MS provides the curriculum and the materials, including software. The university just sits back and collects the money. For their trouble, MS gets a whole generation trained in MS products and nothing else. I looked at the Comp Science program at one major university. Their class "Operating Systems" covers Microsoft Windows and ... Microsoft Windows. Be prepared to provide a) a compelling argument as why the class should be changed and b) several million dollars.
You may remember back when MS was busted for anti-violations they negotiated a penalty. Their penalty was that they had to give a ton of software licenses to elementary schools. In other words, the government trained a million kids to use MS software, using licenses that didn't cost MS anything. That was the penalty. MS knows that's a great thing for them, so they make deals with schools to ensure only Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows is taught at those schools.
There is nothing wrong with teaching students to be proficient with Microsoft Office if it is a tool they will be expected to use as they complete their program. I suspect the problem is less with the course material and more with what you expect an "intro to computing" to be. Maybe you would be more at ease if they renamed the course: "Into to using Microsoft Office in the context of your studies", or simply "Into to Microsoft Office".
Is that a lot of CSci depts (particularly at community colleges and other places that have associate's degrees) across the country have received grant money from Microsoft itself. That will, of course, make it much more difficult for you to convince them to stop "teaching" Microsoft Office.
That plus the fact that many students *want* to be using the tools that are used in the workplace. As long as MS Office dominates the workplace many students will want to use it in college.
The same is true for operating systems to a degree. During the 90s at a state university it was a common request that more classes allow assignments be done is a MS Windows environment. Many students wanted to do their projects using the same operating system and development tools as was commonly used in industry.
For a modern incarnation of this tendency look at the popularity of iOS programing classes at places like Stanford.
I experienced this a couple years back as the course is required for pretty much anything computer related at my local state college. I asked my professor what kind of sweatheart deal M$ make with the school and was promptly ignored...
I made it a point to do the entire course without the book and used OpenOffice to ace the course.
Google is your friend if you want to find the *.ppt files from the book. OpenOffice can do all of the shit the book asks you to do.
You can do it, too.
Fuck 'em.
Ask for a waiver if it's not too late.
I took a C++ class and a Linux class at a local community college and it really just consisted of me going into the head of the department, and asking nicely... (They both needed a pre-req "intro to computers" or something similar.
I started rattling off I knew how to copy and paste, my work history at a couple of ISP's, how I know how to build a computer... by the time I'd gotten this far, she was nodding her head, saying, yup, no problem, you're ok to proceed without. Not even a test.
I had a sucky sig.
It sounds like you should not be in that class to begin with. Your school needs a way to test out of remedial classes like Intro to computers. I teach intro and I can tell you exactly why I don't allow students to use their own operating systems or other document software. The reason is simple, nearly 80% (yes, statistically proven in my case) of my students have trouble locating the icon to Microsoft Office. Certainly, the remaining 20% could survive on their own, and the small percentage of students that wind up taking the course that shouldn't could sometimes write their own document processing suite.
It sounds like your university needs to consider allowing students to test out of intro, but changing it to be more open merely adds a significant level of complexity for the instructor that would detract from the students who truly need the help.
College is not the place for this. It should be at the Trades / tech level with a lower cost and real job skills.
And no Introduction to Computing that is at high school level.
I disagree, I work for the DoD as an Information Assurance Officer. The 8570 requires that all network administrators will have at least a Security+ and all System Admins will have at least an A+ or Net+. You need to have the baseline certs to be considered for any IT related position in the DoD. I have my CCNP/CCDP and CCNA Security certs now and they have helped greatly in both salary and opportunities in the DoD. Now I just need to finish my CISSP....
We need life skills degrees or Dual education system that combines apprenticeships in a company and vocational education.
http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120920/business/709209820/
IT needs some thing like that.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Future-Full-of-Badges/131455/
It's a shame you don't give us more information, like the actual course description or syllabus.
In California, I teach an "Intro to Computers" course, and while we do cover Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint, and Access), we also cover much more. Of 16 weeks, we spend four weeks on hardware, software, and the Internet (and cover things like OSes, binary numbers, file systems, and other things specific to Windows), then we spend four weeks on web design (using HTML and CSS), then four weeks on Excel, three weeks on Access, and a final in PowerPoint.
A modified version of this, for business professionals, exchanges the web design content for Microsoft Word and some online survey and social networking/marketing content.
I realize that not all classes are the same, but I suspect that maybe you're not telling us the entire curriculum covered by the course. If you are, then perhaps you can petition to be tested out. But if you think that people don't need to know Microsoft Office, boy are you wrong. Champion Libre Office or its other competitors all you want -- a college isn't going to graduate someone if they don't know how to use the most common office suite in the country.
1 out of 1000 students can create a document on a different word processor that I can then grade on my WP.
And no, as the teacher I am not going to use 100 word processors so I can grade all the students homework.
Learning to standardize, and learning that you have to use the standard system is in fact a valuable and important part of education. We do it with language, footnotes, mathematical notation, even programming languages - standardizing on a single WP is no different.
In fact learning to adjust to Word, if taught from the right perspective, will in fact prepare students to then (re)standardize on another system.
I shared your frustration, but you have to realize that some percentage of people are scared to death of computers and minimal users. I didn't realize how many people are basically computer illiterate until I was in a 400 level class (senior at my college) called "advanced Oracle database design". It was the last in a series, and you had to have completed 5-6 classes in sequence prior. but somehow a girl slipped into the class when she really needed "into to a computer 100". She couldn't log in, didn't know what the address bar was in a browser, etc....we kind of marveled over her like she as from outer space. Thankfully she dropped. You could have been a cook, and decided that you wanted to "learn computers", so guess what....that Comp 101 class is the level they have to start at. Think about it, just to get into Word or Excel, you need to log in, use a mouse, navigate, launch the program, and then learn the common windows functions. All of these computer skills transfer no matter what Windows program you use. So, while its frustrating now, ride it out because it gets better.
and that is a place where real skills are better then book based theory learning and where teaching who have done real work are better then people who have been in school all there life.
Don't bother.
After having a multitude of conversations with our eager-to-listen-but-quick-to-deter Dean of Engineering, I can tell you from first-hand experience that whatever you do will not change anything.
Try having a conversation with the professor of the class and you will understand immediately. It's the way it is because it's easy for the professor. He/she's probably been teaching it that way for years, so why change? Why should the professor have to *learn* or *do work*? It's complete BS, believe me
required classes are a cash grab and some places still have forced Swim Test.
College needs to be cut down and there needs to be more NON college tech / trades classes out there.
CS is not IT and it's not help desk / desktop or even system admin work.
IT's more on the programing site very's by college and comes with a lot of filler and fluff.
you thinking of tech / Community College and 4 years is over kill.
why not Wordperfect or lotus notes some places still use it and must people likely do not as much as they do with office.
Thank you Mr. Heinlein.
You HAVE to have the book based theory planning if you want to ever do more than guess. Ive seen a TON of troubleshooting that took way longer than it had to because the engineer simply didnt understand basic things like ARPs and how packets traverse switches. And Ive made my share of boneheaded decisions because I didnt adequately understand the theory.
You can look at the network from an abstract high-level view (treating switches as dumb junction boxes and routers as magical subnet connectors), but you will end up missing things that could have a critical impact on your network.
This isnt some field where things work different in practice than in the lab; enterprise-grade equipment behaves in the real world EXACTLY like it does in the lab, and the better you understand that behavior that behavior the better you can plan a deployment. People who learned exclusively "in the field" tend to not understand WHY things work they way they do, and consequently have a limited ability to troubleshoot them when they break.
I challenged the "intro course" when it was Office 97. Got something like 95% despite never having touched SQL. Just pay to do the final exam early (challege the course)
I was under the impression that education at the university level was not job training but about concepts and understanding.
I would expect a new student at a university to already know these things.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I think the most important argument is the fact that teaching someone a specific application is ultimately going to be wasted. I know plenty of people who took courses specific to a given version of msoffice, and are now finding themselves completely stuck when they start a job and their employer is using a different version.
Teaching a specific application is not teaching, it's marketing, and is extremely damaging to those doing the course. They will become dependent on that one application and the way it does things, and when faced with anything different they won't be able to cope with it.
Teaching general concepts, alongside a range of different applications is the only sensible approach... Teach what various options do, and then let the students find those options in a range of programs themselves, using google or the built in help etc.
The most important thing you can teach people, is the ability to teach themselves. They might have a teacher they can ask for help in college, but outside that may not always be the case.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I presume from the degree he is seeking, an associates, that this is a community college - basically a trade school for low-income white collar workers. This is at the high school (or lower) level, but the CC system takes in people for whom algebra is absolute rocket science.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Furthering the point about "being in the wrong class" - this took me a while to realize (been going to college since 2003 - part and full time). Basically get to be friends with your department head. Once I realized you can simply ask to get overrides for certain courses (and test out of others depending on school policy) your schooling career gets to be much less painful. Just be able to 1) communicate your desire clearly and 2) communicate your knowledge within that course clearly.
Related - if you were like me and got skipped straight into Calculus due to high entrance test scores and realize you know none of the foundational knowledge - you know...like any of the Trig they were discussing, there's no shame in asking to be placed back a class. Ultimately - education is what you make of it. Learning to communicate effectively and making it work for you is a major part of that.
The CSCI department at any college has a few bread and butter courses like this to justify their own existence. Sure, a few CSCI majors study LaTeX and functional programming, and take discrete math courses. But the CSCI department earns its bread and butter by having a few courses like this required by either the whole university or a major component like the business school. The CSCI department has a guy who is not a professor ("Lecturer" etc) who can relate to these students to teach it, and so the professors don't have to. You'll never change this - they have to provide a course like this to exist.
I had a drastically different expirience in my intro to computing class. it was the first hugely difficult course we had to take in compsci, we needed 15-20 point scales just to pass. we covered binary logic, inductive proof, set theory, DFA's, some number theory, and regular expressions. I have called upon stuff I learned from that class in more than half the classes I have taken much to my chagrin because I never wanted to see that stuff again it caused so much anxiety and dread.
This is an intro to using a computer course, not an intro to computer science course. The original poster is confusing the two. Much like English 102 (How to write a paper). And the course required before I started my engineering Co-Op (How to write a resume, behave in a business setting, order a meal at an interview, the difference between communicating in an email, a letter, and in person.) And the business survey course. Some courses are major focused, some courses are for breadth, and some courses are to give you the basic faculties in order to operate at the university/college level.
These are the skills people complain are most missing in students with degrees, and I can't tell you the number of competent IT professionals (Mostly business programmers) who can't use a PC competently. They are often wizards of their environment, but have to have attaching a file explained in painful detail. - though I'll admit this example is vanishingly rare now a days.
Also, with 30 years of experience, this should have been waiveable, I was able to waive the general computing courses in two degrees and two different universities due to having an IT background. I waived 30% of the core requirements for my masters due to recent undergrad work, and it resulted in me having the opportunity to do more advanced course work. Even at the masters level there are still survey / general skills courses, just not as many.
I had the same Problem. So, I challenged the course and was issued a final exam by the instructor. After passing the exam, I skipped that class.
Two thoughts to bring up with them: (a) Can one of your old credits be used as a substitution for this class. We will typically ask a substitution for a class that is clearly more advanced and in the same field. (b) Failing that, does the school offer a CLEP exam. Check with your university's testing center.
and the book were titled "Libre Office 3.3.2.14", other people would complain because they don't use it in their workplace. Much less, the book publishers would have even more incentive to change the book with each new minor (or worse) revision of Libre Office.
Hate to tell ya OP, but not many businesses use anything other than MS office. So you may as well get over it.
You are in college to prepare for a career in a business. Businesses primarily use Microsoft Office. Most college degrees aim to be working at a desk in front of a computer. If you condense computers down to an introduction course, then you will primarily focus on what people tend to use computers for. That happens to be using Microsoft Office.
Why not have a chat to the people who are teaching the course, explain your concerns, find out who devised the curriculum and when it was last revised. You may find that you have allies in the faculty, who also feel that it needs updating and they will be able to advise in terms of who the most effective people to write to are, and how you should couch your arguments to get the best effect.
Yeah, those classes are just aweful. I was a TA for one of those courses, and had to teach labs. Nothing worse than teaching a class that you wouldn't even show up to yourself.
Your description, to me, is of a "intro to using computers for office tasks" class. If that's what you need, then using Office as a template isn't a waste of time, though the class should at least mention other office productivity options, their pluses and minuses.
I would expect an "intro to computing" class to cover the basics of input, output, and processing; of code execution, storage, register manipulation; keyboard and mouse operation and displays; of communication, data transfer, IEEE 802.x protocols, wireless and wired transmission. Etc. etc - this is just off the top of my head and there are probably better and more thorough lists of topics around.
But I'm biased.
The best thing to do right now is to ACE the course and continue acing your courses. Then once you are close to your final year, go have a chat with the dept chair/ dean. You will be amazed at how receptive the admin will be to your suggestions, since you have 30 yrs of experience and you will have all A's in your course work. (Unless you are attending one of the for profit universities then they want to do what is easy/ most profitable). The trick is to offer suggestions on what will make the course better for the entire class. Some students come in not knowing how to log onto a computers, others believe that internet explorer is the internet. Thus the course is required. You could also talk to your prof now and see if there is a way to get exempted from the course through a petition to chairperson for curriculum. In my dept that would be the undergrad curriculum director or the grad director. Usually if you can demonstrate you have mastered the objectives of the course (usually through a written or oral exam) then they will exempt you from the course and ask you to take a more challenging course and count those credit hours towards your degree, or just give you the credit hours. While most of us at Slashdot get to use our computers for more than word processors/ spreadsheets, this is hardly the experience of most users. Not only that, "intro to computing" is likely to be one of those "core curriculum" courses that every one is required to take. That way when you are a senior and required to write up your capstone/ design project the prof does not have to waste time teaching the students how to insert equations/citations or how to set up a spreadsheet to run some simple calculations. Yes it sucks but push through and you never know you may learn some useful feature in word, highly doubtful as we are talking about MS.
insert inflammatory comment here!
I know at my girlfriend's old college their Intro to Computing course was the same as yours, but mine was a full-on Python experience with programming a small robot. The difference was that I attend a technical institute and not a traditional university. Maybe that has a little to do with it.
Call it "Office Software" and everyone will be happy.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Your barking up the wrong tree. The only thing you need is a teaching degree and plenty of certs.
"Introduction to Computing [...] boring and pretty useless for someone who's used PCs for about 20 years"
Is this some kind of elaborate joke?
And intro to computers course might teach the basic use of specific software but only to such a degree that it helps the student understand the general usage and understanding of a computer. After taking such a course the student should be able to talk with tech personnel well enough to be useful to the tech person in resolving problems beyond what the student learned in "intro to computing".
Its really not difficult to understand this and with it realize the school promoting MS office as a credited course on Intro to computing is not being honest with its students. The students are not going to learn what they are paying to learn.
When I went to college, the university I was at had an introduction to computing class. It was a "history and use of computers" sort of thing, with some talk about what computers are used for, a light introduction to programming, these are the parts of a computer, this is what a database is and some things you might use it for, all that sort of thing. It was in general track and was a 1000 level class (freshman-level, like a 10X at many colleges). It was taught out of the computer science department.
The university's computer support center ran classes in Word, Excel, Access, Photoshop, etc. These were on nights and weekends, and they weren't school-style classes -- they were more like training classes, where you'd sit there in the lab for four hours getting a little lecture, but mostly doing exercises of 'format this page to have such-and-such margins' and the like. Each one was a single session. These classes were free for students, but didn't count for any sort of college credit. They had 'basic' and 'advanced' classes for each software package they taught. The packages taught were those that were already on the computers in the computer labs.
The university also ran a "center for professional development", which taught more intensive classes on these sorts of things, and was aimed at job training. Classes there were evening classes on weekdays and were about an hour and a half long, meeting one or two days a week for two to six weeks. These were aimed at adults with jobs who wanted to learn new skills, and the curriculum was broader than the computer support center's, including not just office applications, but also things like retouching photos with Photoshop, web site creation with Dreamweaver, etc. I knew a few people who took those classes, and according to them, each had a primary software package that the students were supposed to use, but also spent a little bit of time talking about alternative packages, including free ones, and the teachers would accept work done with other packages, as long as the final format was something they could view with the course's main package. The CPD classes cost money, but since there were much shorter than college classes and didn't give college credit, they were much, much cheaper.
This always struck me as a good mix: the college class was more theoretical. College students could either pick up the actual skills at using the programs themselves or take the classes from computer support to learn to use the specific packages the computer labs had. And lastly, those interested in more in-depth job training involving computers had options for that.
Take a clep test versus the actual course.
We ran two two-billion Euro projects off Access.
The "database gods" told me I couldn't store BLOBS in there (no shit), so I stored URLs.
They told me it would fall over (no shit), but the number of rows was always going to be managable.
They told me they couldn't support it (no shit!), so I got a boy in for that, and trained him up with the basics.
They told me I needed MySQL on the back end because the Access engine was shit (no shit), and that was all elitist bullshit too.
In good old fashioned MS style, the DB survived two migrations. Office 2003 > 2007 > 2010.
Sledgehammer. Nuts.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Make sure you get the letter to the right person. Department chairs, deans, presidents, etc., get a lot of correspondence and have to filter through it quickly. They are not likely to move on it, even if they do read it. The instructor of the class may not have any say about it. I taught a class like that: I was given the book, told what I was expected to cover, and had to make it work with the existing computer equipment. While I had some flexibility and autonomy, I did not have the power to change the class in a meaningful way. Real change takes time and there is little incentive to work hard to redesign a class where the changes don't go into effect until after your contract expires.
The person who has the power to change the class is the curriculum chair for the department, and even that person doesn't have complete control. Any change is still a committee decision. Give him or her a well-written letter and it can be used to help win over committee members. Often what is done is not the best solution, but the best compromise given conflicting goals and opinions.
Make the letter positive and supportive, like "you have such a great program. I recently took the YYY class, and I think it could be made even better by ..." Also, be clear and specific.
YOU are taking a Course for AA. YOU are unique in that you have 20 years of experience.
That's course is for people coming out of high school that may not have much experience using the most used Office application in the world.
So stop and think about other people for a moment.
IYt would literally be a waste of time from 99.99% of there students,. Add to that if you can use Office well, you can use everything else. BTW, I know a lot of people who have been using computer for decades and still are only aware of 10% of the features.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For clerks and factory workers who know how to use Office-like turnkey products. And a large fraction of the US population do not have the math skills to set up the equations in a spreadsheet.
They should let experienced people like you 'est out" of this requirement by just taking the final exam.
biggest drawback in my education is not the theory - but the application of everything. that being said, there should be a way to challenge the class if you think it is beneath you.
office 2010 has loads of features - some of which may make you more useful to your future employer.
tuition is always a joke and people who says that education is purely a means to make you a better person didn't realize that after paying ~$30k for a degree, you are still the same person, except with more debt.
challenge the course - don't expect college to change just because you don't like its courses and a $30k degree won't really change the person you really are. (although it might prevent some automatic HR bot from immediately sifting you out)
Partly, that's why they're at a temp agency, partly, it's the old George Carlin line:
Perhaps for some, but a number of people, such as myself a number of years ago, were at a temp agency because I was laid off, had rent to pay, and virtually all companies hire through temp agencies nowadays. Getting into a company *directly* is essentially impossible. Getting in through a temp agency is a foot in the door however, and all you can do is pray that when your term is up, the company hires you on full-time. Course, most places will keep you on through the temp agency for multiple years, since then they don't have to pay vacation, benefits, need 2 weeks to let you go, need a reason to let you go, or anything else that would force them to treat you like a person instead of a consumable meant to be used up and thrown away.
Why would I work at a place like that? Well, it IS occasionally nice to have food in my stomach.
However, I managed to get away from all of that trainwreck of corporations a while ago. I'm working in a smaller office now, that I managed to get into by direct application (although having a friend work here probably helped, so once again, it's not what you know, but who you know... way of the world), and love it here.
But for those not lucky enough, or have the right connections, well... hope the place the temp agency places you takes pity on you after a few years and takes you on full time. Not having vacation, benifits, or any kind of medical plan is pretty rough.
Okay hang on a second here. I am confused... why on earth would somebody with a Bachelors Degree earned in the early 1980s would have any interest in attempting to earn a lower level degree? What's the point? Why not just take whatever classes you are interested in as continuing education and move on?
I don't know about your profs, but mine all want everything in PDF, and if you send a DOC it will be rejected. Not only because that way you can use whatever you want to write them, but because PDFs are universal. Opening random DOC files with macros enabled isn't very safe, either.
Welcome to the dumbed down college education of the 21st century!
The truth of the matter is that Microsoft is THE standard. You will not get to change much because the corporate IT world revolves around Microsoft and other big corporations. The best you might be able to do is to suggest that some Open office content be added which has Some Microsoft compatability. You have the infinite loop in place: Microsoft supports Colleges thus they in Quid pro quo teach only Microsoft Products in certain courses. Unlike most want to admit we already live in a fascist country where the major international corporations that are only interested in profit and market share control much of our lives.
Microsoft's Academic Alliance Program. That is all.
why didnt you just test out of the class?
You are not going their to learn, you are going there to get a degree. Just play their game, give them your money, and get your degree. It doesn't matter what college you go to, so just go to the cheapest one.
.. I learned more Fortran in less than a week reading the WATFIV book instead of the entire semester I took later when I wanted the credit for it. I learned ADA in a few days. I took C++ from an online course in a few days. Learned Java on my own. If you really want to learn something, buy the book and learn it yourself.
.. if my chance there is a class that you actually want to learn something from, by all means take it. Just don't expect college requirements to give you anything you will actually find useful when you get out. It might .. just don't expect it. You will have to work to find things that are actually of value that they offer.
No one cares whether or not you actually learned anything of value, you just need that degree so you can get past HR. Once you get past HR, you can talk to someone who probably knows what they need and show them that in your 30 years you have learned lots of stuff far in far less time than it takes any college to teach you. Hey
Now
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Meh!
I had a philosophy class with this guy at Notre Dame:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_McInerny
There were only 6 (SIX!) people in the class and the only reason I took it (St. Aquinas) was because they were not running the class on Aristotle and my engineering schedule made it difficult to accomodate when they did.
You might be amazed at how many opportunities there are at a university that go unused. Think of the fluff classes with 150-500 students as allowing for the more intimate classes with 4-20 students.
My history class was Medieval history with a guy that brought weapons and armor to class. Most people just took the fluff class.
When you realize that, affecting change will become much easier.
Actually won't, you'll just realize why affecting change isn't going to happen.
Microsoft says what they do and do not teach in that course because Microsoft paid for it. The thing to do is get the name of whatever worthless shill college or votech out there so that others know not to go anywhere near them. What college was it?
And maybe he'll learn that the word for causing something to happen is effect.
Analogous Models & Digital Computing, lulu.com
No. I am laughing at you because you claim that two or more stories that may or may not be based on a real incident or person, that have likely been transformed over time to works of fiction which, when retold, are "too good to be true" constitutes data. It doesn't take a genius to quickly realize that ...Even when many anecdotes are collected to prove a point, "The plural of anecdote is not data." (Roger Brinner[19]) On the plus side, I hear Digg is looking for new members all the time.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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Apologies to OP, but I would take the exact opposite stance. Every person graduating college should have an understanding of how to use Microsoft Office. Sorry if you're anti-Microsoft, but colleges teach what most businesses use, and for the moment that's MS Office. I can't tell you how many people come to be employed by the company I work for that don't even have a basic understanding of MS Office, like how to do a sort in Excel or create a signature in Outlook. Every graduate needs to have this knowledge and I'd love to see colleges up the MS Office curriculum because that means I don't have to teach these things to people. I understand there are times where you have to take basic courses in college that cover material you already know, and instead of not teaching that material because a few people will already know it, they should just make it easy to skate by in the course if you already know the material.