Computer Use and Immersion in a Non-IT Course

Introduction For several years, we have developed and augmented pedagogy that uses the computer to support lectures and problem-solving in the classroom and makes extensive lecture notes available to students for self-study. While the computer techniques used are unremarkable in the field of information technology (IT), their application is significantly innovative for a numerically technical but non-IT course--cost accounting. Our contributions have been to develop methods for applying computers in non-IT, routine daily instruction and to use the computer to empower students' self-study. A summary of the issues involved, paraphrasing and quoting in part from Brecht, Sauls and Beirne, (2000) and from Brecht, Ogilby and Sauls, (2003) are provided below. Many academic programs, including our accounting program, have experienced changing demographics for students, such as an increase in students who have English as a second language. Complete lecture files give these students the ability to re-experience and self-study lectures in the exact presentation sequence and with the same content as originally heard. This study can be done at an individual's own reading-comprehension pace and with the aid of dictionaries if needed. The premise for this benefit is that the instructor uses the same computer files to present the lecture. Complete lecture files also benefit students with deficiencies in educational backgrounds, including lack of prior exposure to topics in core courses or the need to study prerequisite topics on a remedial level. An increasing number of students work part or full time. Especially for night classes, these students are likely to be tired, and find intense concentration and retention difficult. Complete lecture files allow them to get a lighter overview and familiarization with topics during class and intensively self-study the entire lecture content on weekends or as study time becomes available. Although none of the authors has class-tested these computer-use methods in a web-based course, it appears reasonable to expect that we have developed a way to lecture over the internet. Complete lecture files can be delivered to students and can be printed by them before a class session. When combined with streaming audio and other online student-instructor interaction capabilities, students can participate at a high interaction level in the online session. Class session content is not delayed by students' capabilities to take notes during the online session. Students can pre-study the lecture's content to support more targeted questions and interaction. Moreover, an instructor's choice of topic content is substantially freed from a textbook as the only efficient and feasible way to transfer a large body of content. The pedagogy and computer-use techniques we presented in our earlier papers were class tested in required undergraduate cost-accounting classes over more than two years. The Computer Immersion Strategy (CIS)--presented in this paper--is being class tested in the Fall 2003 in an elective management accounting course. This repeated class testing strengthens our understanding and evaluation of the pedagogy and techniques' success. However, we have been significantly evolving computer-use methodology so rapidly that while we have conducted results-oriented surveys, we have yet to statistically test our pedagogy and techniques' success. Our evaluation of this previous pedagogy and techniques' success, limitations, and difficulties is presented in the next section of the paper. Initially conceived to resolve failings we found with the previous pedagogy and techniques, we extend the above types of innovation to a Computer Immersion Strategy (CIS). Our CIS requires a classroom with a computer at every student's desk and engages students with the computer interactively in class as well as at home. As much as is possible, daily and throughout the course, the computer is used by students as well as the instructor. …