PDF Ebook Customising Microsoft Office to develop a tutorial learning environment
Powerful applications such as Microsoft Office’s Excel and Word are widely used to perform common tasks in the workplace and in education. Scripting within these applications allows unanticipated user requirements to be addressed. We show that such extensibility, intended to support office automation-type applications, is well suited to the creation of learning activities and learning environments. We have developed a range of tutorial activities using Excel and Word in introductory mathematics, writing and economics courses. These tutorials have the dual purpose of teaching academic concepts and practical computer literacy skills. The software architecture of our learning environment includes a database-supported back-end to automatically record students’ responses, which allows for greater control over what students do.
Additionally, this allows one to automate common procedures to improve usability and feedback automation to support learning. We have been applying our ideas for the last six years and currently 1,500 students are using the environment. We suggest that this pragmatic solution can provide a high degree of interactivity and flexibility in a range of learning contexts that represents a cost-effective alternative for use alongside traditional approaches.
Often educators and students are resistant to novel computer applications, preferring familiar and productive environments in which to teach and learn. This observation encouraged us to develop a learning environment that exploits existing applications already appreciated in teaching. Such applications are called ‘worldware’ (Ehrmann, 1995), a term coined to describe software with a substantial market outside the educational sector that is also valued for teaching and learning. Microsoft Office is a familiar example, but others include GIS (geographic information systems), CAD computer-aided design) systems and statistical packages. Worldware is widely used at the University of Cape Town (UCT), but generally not integrated with any virtual learning environments. Whereas the term learning environment describes a wide range of teaching spaces, our interest is specifically to support tutorial-style teaching at a residential university.
Our learning environment, called MOVES (MEG’s Office-based Virtual Study), is built around Excel and Word to support tutorials. We have used the MOVES approach since 1997 to develop tutorial activities, mostly for introductory mathematics, statistics and writing courses. It provides a tutorial environment for computer laboratories that is comparatively easy and cheap to create, can hide complexity while exposing real-world practice, and will improvefeedback cycles and learning support. Our approach to design and its usage in tutorials offers a pragmatic solution that aims to balance the limitations of using Office applications with the potential for exploiting reuse, accelerating development and simplifying maintenance.
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PDF Ebook Customising Microsoft Office to develop a tutorial learning environment
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