About This CD

This CD was created by students in BMGT 201, Introduction to Business Computing, in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. The semester-long project during Fall 2002 involved students in the creation of teaching materials concerning the very subject matter they were studying. The project is based on the pedagogy long championed by Professor Ben Shneiderman in the University of Maryland’s Computer Science Department. This pedagogy, called “Relate-Create-Donate,” theorizes that students will become more engaged in the material they are learning and will more effectively master that material if, as part of their learning experience, they create learning artifacts and then contribute those artifacts to some wider audience – in this case, a community of fellow learners at the National University of Rwanda. (See Dr. Shneiderman’s article at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/relate_create_donate/.)

Individual units, consisting of PowerPoint presentations, Web pages, student projects and exercises, and quiz questions, were created by 45 four-person student teams. Three student teams developed learning materials for each of 15 topics: one unit on Windows, four units on Word, four on Excel, one on PowerPoint, three on Access, and two on FrontPage. The materials were based loosely on Grauer and Barber’s Exploring Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, as well as the Microsoft website and other electronic sources. The each of the 15 topics, the best student project was selected for inclusion on this CD. Additional small student teams were involved in setting standards for the PowerPoint slides and for Web pages, designing a consistent theme, building the menu system, technical troubleshooting, quality control, translating into French, burning the CDs, and creating the CD labels.

Dr. Robert Spear

College Park, Maryland

December 2002