[school-discuss] college intro to IT spawns a course on office computing and business English

[Micheal Cooper <cooper.me@xxxxxxxxx>]

This message refers to a thread that has ended.

I initially asked for suggestions for a skills-based college IT
curriculum for our SCI101 class, which is a team-taught course in
English to introduce students to Info Science for their studies. Many
posters gave me valuable ideas. I stated that I would not be able to
change the curriculum anytime soon, but it seems that might change.

The dean of faculty is pushing for the introduction of a "business
computing" upper-level class designed to give students computer use
skills and an exposure to Business English that will help them in
their careers in office settings, so it would focus on office suites
like MS Office. This will be a new course, so I will be able to freely
design the content, as long as I can justify the decisions. Also, I
will be teaching this course alone because there is no language
component to 3 & 4 year courses, so I can introduce some high-level
skills.

I told the Dean that I had been considering the programs in the
Philippines and the International Computer Drivers License, which were
suggested to me by J. Tim Denny on this mailing list, and the Dean
really liked the idea of structuring the class on the ICDL. Offering
the students another cert for their CVs makes good motivation,
particularly for the third- and fourth-year students who will be the
targets of this course.

If it is approved, this class will begin with one section in the Fall semester.

So here's my game plan so far:
1. Gather info on the Philippines program and the ICDL and work up a
software-neutral syllabus from them.
2. Find out what testing centers there are in Japan for the ICDL and
what software they use, whether it is set in stone, etc.
3. Find out what it would take to get certification on OpenOffice
instead of MS Office in Japan.

Mea Culpa: I plan to use Adobe Captivate to make interactive tutorials
and tests which the students will do as part of their studies. I know
Adobe stuff is far from open source, but the OO equivalents don't
offer two things:
1-interactive screen tutorials that allow the viewer to manipulate the screen
2-SCORM-compatible test results

I haven't used Captivate yet, but it looks like it will be really
helpful, and if it can help me to efficiently create course materials
for doing ICDL on OO, why not. The students don't need Captivate to
use the materials. Unlike teaching MS Office, I am not requiring them
to purchase something. Only the teacher needs to purchase Captivate. I
think this is a scenario where proprietary software could be
justified.

From what I have read, you can make a test in Captivate and post it to
Moodle and have the results recorded by Moodle and appear in your
grades roster with no teacher intervention like inputing points, etc.

Any comments or advice on my plan or the use of Captivate?

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 1:15 AM, J. Tim Denny <johndenny@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> a quick thought...  is the ICDL offered in Miyazaki?   why not think of
> requiring ICDL certification for all students in your uni...   or  you can
> devise  your own ICDL like exams...  see the open source version at:
> http://www.openicdl.org.za/

-- 
Micheal Cooper
Miyazaki, Japan (GMT+9, no DST)