What's common to B-school students of Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSoM), IIT Kharagpur and those in Lundquist College of Business (LCB), University of Oregon? Well, both have professors who are not only well-versed in the latest web technologies but also involve their students hands-on with these technologies.
1. VGSoM, IIT Kharagpur
We have featured Professor Prithwis Mukerjee of VGSoM before as a Zoho power user. Prof Mukerjee continues to getting himself accustomed to the latest tech trends. He uses
Facebook's discussion board to full effect in communicating with his students. One of his latest assignments to his students - make a short movie and upload to YouTube or create a mini ERP system in Zoho Creator. His problem statement for the Order-to-Cash ERP app:
The Order-to-Cash process begins with the arrival ( and recording ) of
an order for a specified product from an approved customer. The order
can ONLY be accepted if a sufficient inventory exists of the product.
After the order is accepted, it is fulfilled at some point of time when
an invoice has to be generated. Generation of the invoice also creates a
Accounts Receivable entry and sets the order status to delivered.
Subsequently a payment is received, the invoice is marked paid, the AR
entry is marked paid and credit entry is made in the cash ledger.
11 student groups made the Zoho Creator app and I was honored when the Professor asked me to judge the apps made by his students and award them marks :) The related
discussion thread in Facebook.
Prof. Mukerjee blogged about it too.
2. LCB, Univ of Oregon
Associate Professor of Decision Sciences, Michael Pangburn, teaches Business Information Systems (DSC340) at LCB, UofO. And he not only uses
his blog to communicate with his students but also makes each of his students create one - their blog roll. His
notes page for the course DSC340. And one of his
home work assignments to his students:
Assignment Description
Download a copy of
this Excel file.
This “Presidents.xls” spreadsheet file contains 4 database tables: (i)
president (a list of presidents), (ii) party (a list of parties), (iii)
state (a list of states), and (iv) priorPosition (a list of prior
positions that presidents have held).
Go to
http://db.zoho.com, a free
online database service, and login (either create a new account or login
using the Google, Facebook, or Yahoo! login options). Create a new
(initially blank) database and then your
1st database task
is to use the “Import .XLS” feature to
import, one at a time, each of the four worksheets
within the Presidents.xls workbook–each worksheet will become a distinct table in your database.
After the importing of those four tables, your
2nd task
with the database is to create a 5th table to capture the Many-to-Many
relationship between the two tables you imported that correspond to the
two worksheets: ‘president’ and ‘priorPositions.’ To create a table,
click the
New–>New Table
drop-down menu option and create
the new table using “Design View.” In design view, you simply type in
the column names you want; double-click on the default data type to
change it.
You need to figure out what columns should be in this table that should connect presidents to positions.
Save the table with the name ‘PresPositions’ and then add 3-4 rows of
true data
(use Wikipedia or other information source) to this table, connecting a few presidents to their
actual past positions
. After adding your data, be sure to
click the Save button
to save the data.
After creating the Many-to-Many bridge table, your
3rd task
with the database is to
write the following query
:
Show presidents’ first and last names, their political party name, birth state name, and their prior position title(s).
This requires that you join the 5 tables in the database, so you need
to specify the 4 joining conditions that connect those tables to each
other.
The query results will only show those presidents for
whom you provided past-positions data in the 2nd step above, which is
expected (and it’s fine).
Note: to access the SQL interface in Zoho, click the
New–>New Query Table
drop-down menu option.
It was nice to see him use Zoho Analytics for teaching SQL query functions and joining of two tables. I mailed him thanking him for using Zoho and he promptly replied back asking a couple of questions about entering data and embedding options in Zoho Analytics.
Great to see Zoho and other current technologies being used in classrooms. If you are a student or instructor using such technologies in your courses, please do share your views in the comments.
thanks arvind for featuring our students application on your blog.the three "best" applications as evaluated by Arvind can be seen at #....
thanks arvind for featuring our students application on your blog.the three "best" applications as evaluated by Arvind can be seen at #....