Enhancing Excel Skills in Teaching Undergraduates in Busin

INTRODUCTION The Dolan School of Business at Fairfield University (DSB), like many other universities, does not require incoming freshmen to take a proficiency test or an introduction class of basic Excel skills under the assumption that their basic skills are already adequate from high school and will be further improved by the time when they graduate from college. However, feedbacks from the Continuous Improvement Assessment Committee (CIAC) of the DSB and from the DSB Advisory Board indicate that improving basic Excel skills is one of the key areas necessary to close the feedback loop. In other words, efforts have to be made to enhance their basic Excel skills (e.g., spreadsheet organization, formulas & functions, cell relationships, graphics, and advanced functions) during their early years in college so that they can be better prepared for more advanced business courses and become more competitive in real business world after graduation. OM101 Operations Management as a required undergraduate business core course is a natural starting point to enhance basic Excel skills. While we encourage students to use Excel for homework assignments along with other business applications in the subject area, we often encounter technical difficulties due to uneven Excel skill levels and overwhelming subject topics to be covered in the operations management class. Moreover, most textbooks currently available in operations management (e.g., Collier & Evans, 2011-2012; Jacobs & Chase, 2011;) do not provide detailed Excel related instructions for homework problems, and most commercially available Excel instructions (e.g., Walkenbach, 2010) are too general to attract student attention. In this paper, we try to enhance basic Excel skills in teaching OM101 class by selecting appropriate homework problems that are relevant to basic Excel skills and by providing problem-specific Excel instructions to facilitate student learning. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses problem selection. Section 3 illustrates problem-specific Excel instructions. Section 4 depicts implementation and learning outcomes. Section 5 summarizes the paper. PROBLEM SELECTION In light of overwhelming required subject topics to be covered in OM101 and lack of Excel related instructions with the currently available operations management textbooks, we believe the best way to enhance basic Excel skills in this teaching innovation project is to develop problem-specific Excel instructions for selected homework problems, instead of using general purpose Excel instructions. Appropriate subject topics within the current textbook (Jacobs & Chase, 2011) are carefully selected so that a variety of basic Excel skills in the OM101 class will be included. Such topics as break-even analysis, forecasting, and inventory management are good candidates for initial experiment and implementation. More advance topics are to be included later on. Homework problems relevant to such basic Excel skills as data input, analysis, calculation (formulas & functions), and simulation are potential candidates here. Specifically we focus our initial attention on data input (spreadsheet organization), formatting, basic formulas and functions, self-defined functions (cell relationships), chart building, and data analysis (advanced functions) skills that are essential to business students or specified by the CIAC as core technological competencies. EXCEL INSTRUCTIONS Sample problem-specific Excel instructions are illustrated in this section. With a variety of different problems associated with carefully selected subject topics in OM101, we try to develop user-friendly problem-specific instructions, which are designed for students with different Excel background. A forecasting problem from Chapter 15 (Jacobs & Chase, 2011), for example, is to demonstrate how we enhance basic Excel skills via problem-specific Excel instructions. …