{"id":8793,"date":"2017-05-07T19:44:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T00:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.maryville.edu\/mpress\/?p=8793"},"modified":"2018-08-07T19:53:28","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T00:53:28","slug":"teaching-students-to-excel-in-a-digital-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maryville.edu\/mpress\/teaching-students-to-excel-in-a-digital-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Students to Excel in a Digital World"},"content":{"rendered":"
Digital literacy is a twenty-first century workforce imperative. It\u2019s not enough to understand apps like Uber, Twitter, Yelp, Google Maps or Spotify. College students today need to know how to use business productivity apps \u2014 really use them \u2014 because nearly every industry relies on them.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents come to college thinking they \u2018know\u2019 technology, but they have a lot to learn about critically thinking through technology in a business environment,\u201d says Stacy Hollins, PhD, associate professor of information systems and assistant dean for Maryville\u2019s Simon School of Business. <\/p>\n
\u201cStudents know how to use social networking tools. And they know how to bold and underline and italicize data. But when I ask them to create formulas in Excel or use other higher-level functions in business technologies, many of them don\u2019t haven\u2019t a clue,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Hollins, who joined the Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵAPPfaculty last summer, has overhauled ISYS 100, the introductory information systems course formerly known as Computer Literacy and now called Digital Foundations. <\/p>\n
The fundamentals of the course are the same as they\u2019ve always been, Hollins says. It\u2019s the study of systems used to move data around to improve profit and increase productivity. All first-year business students take the course, along with students in other disciplines that require it, such as physical therapy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe baseline skills are the same, even though we\u2019re learning and using apps on the iPad instead of being tethered to computers,\u201d says Hollins. \u201cIn addition to learning new digital technologies, students still need to know how to produce documents, create spreadsheets, design presentation and get into databases to query information.\u201d<\/p>\n