Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It's easy enough to take with a full schedule. I'm taking the same course online as it's required. (I need 13 credit hours minimum to collect full G.I.Bill stipend.)
The main annoyance is learning the SAM 2010 environment since it accepts a specific set of answers though there are obviously many ways to use Office.
Learn the SAM "style" and to use D2L if your school uses it then exploit the easy course.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ;-)
... 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.
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 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.
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.)
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/ .
Or you could try to explain to them that the class isn't called "Intro to Word Processing". As a side note, you (SpikedThree) could use a course called "Intro to Logic".
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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
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.
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.
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.
And the reason that these "intro to computing" or "college computing" or "intro to college computing" classes exist is to give all the students the ability to have basic skills with an office suite that they will need for the rest of their education.
Write a document in Word or Writer, set the margins to X, set it to double space, right justify this bit, left justify the rest, etc. Here's how to format a bibliography entry. Here's how to print to a PDF file or save as PDF. Here's how Excel or Spreasheets work, here's how to enter a basic formula, here's how to print just the active worksheet or range of cells.
You know... things that just about any college student needs to be able to do, just to make the rest of their educational experience easier.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos