Reference Publications

Computer Literacy Skills for Computer Information Systems Majors: A Case Study

Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2004 by McDonald, David S

Also, although Thomson Learning would not give permission to display actual exam questions, they were amenable to including a screen-capture from a SAM2000® sample exam (see appendix). Major tasks/objectives are listed as section headings. Subtasks are then chosen from which the actual interactive tasks are created. An interactive demo can be found at: http://www.course.com/testandtrain/sam2000.cfm.>Additionally, Thomson Learning, Inc. was willing to forgo the licensing fees as long as the University recommended a series of Course Technology books as remedial reading material for those students failing to pass the exams (Course Technology is a division of Thomson Learning, Inc.). In essence, the contract provided the University with $100,000 worth of licenses, enough to cover testing the entire student population, at no charge. However, the University bookstore had to agree to stock sufficient copies of Course Technology's remedial books. Although Course Technology books were the main source of remedial training, this was not the only source of help provided to the student. The University also licenses the eLearning package, a self-paced, online tutorial, for remedial assistance in using Microsoft Office products. Ironically, Course Technology's TOM (training online manager) package was deemed too expensive for use by the entire university.

It should be noted that this was the first time that Thomson had made such an arrangement. This project was as much a pilot for Thomson Learning, Inc. as it was for the University. Since the University had very high enrollments, Thomson hoped that the additional book sales would offset the cost of the licenses. To this author's knowledge, Thomson has not made this offer to any other educational institution.

5. IMPLEMENTATION

The strategic plan, developed by the ad hoc committee, and with the approval of the Associate Dean, called for testing one of the College's largest departments, the Computer Information Systems (CIS) Department. The committee believed that students with this major would be better suited to work through the expected problems that occur with the implementation of any large-scale, technical project. Also, unlike any other departments within the College, the CIS Department required its students to have knowledge of all of the CSPs. Moreover, the CIS Department consisted of 1800 graduate and undergraduate students, a sufficiently large number to adequately pilot the testing software package. The CIS Department was scheduled to begin testing in January 2002. After refining a suitable testing protocol with the CIS Department, the plan called for testing the rest of the Robinson College of Business during the 2003-2004 academic year. Finally, testing would begin for the other colleges in the University beginning with the 2004 academic year.

The ad hoc committee created a series of six, one-hour exams. The SAM2000® software package allowed for faculty to choose amongst 30,000 questions in a pre-defmed test bank. The questions were chosen that best matched the learning objectives shown in table 2. As mentioned previously, each of these questions had been previously validated by Thomson Learning and Microsoft Corporation. Each member of the committee tested their own knowledge as well as the time required to take the exams. For the faculty, most were able to finish the exam in approximately 20 minutes. Thus, the one-hour limit given to the students should have been more than adequate.