SYLLABUS FOR BADM 260 – 2007

Office  : BUSN 407

Phone  : 860.486.6485

Class Hours  : ASYNCHRONOUS (ONLINE) course

Office Hours  : 1.00-3.00 PM on Wednesday and by appointment (anytime)

 Email  : rohit.aggarwal@business.uconn.edu

Course website – WebCT: https://vista.uconn.edu/

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course is designed to give students basic knowledge and understanding of information technology and its use in the networked economy. It is based on the premise that knowledge of information system is essential for creating a competitive firm, managing global corporations, and providing useful products and services to customers.

COURSE ORGANIZATION: BADM 260 is an online (asynchronous) course. This means that there will be no traditional lectures conducted every week, instead all of the material will be provided to you online using Vista site.  There are obvious advantages and disadvantages of the online course approach:

Advantages:

·        students have more flexibility in managing their course-work and time

·        students do not have to attend lectures

Disadvantages:

·        students are required to be self-motivated

·        students have to be capable of self-studying and self-learning

·        students need to have a systematic approach and good organization skills

WAYS OF COMUNICATIONS: For any communication please email me at the following address- rohit.aggarwal@business.uconn.edu. I will reply to your mails as soon as possible.

REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS: 

·        Textbook 1 – Patrick McKeown, “Information Technology & The Network Economy”, Thomson Course Technology, 2003, Second Edition

·        Textbook 2 – Gary B. Shelly, Thomas J. Cashman, Misty E. Vermaat, “Microsoft Office 2003. Introductory Concepts and Techniques”, Thomson Course Technology, 2006, Second Edition

Co-op has bundled the books together. Optionally, students may purchase the books separately from your preferred textbook vendor.

GRADING:  The final course grade will be based on two written exams, a software (MS Office) practical exam, and online quizzes.

IN-CLASS EXAMS:  There will be one in-class, closed-book mid-term exam and one in-class, closed-book final exam. The exams are non-cumulative and are weighted as stated below.  For each exam, students will be responsible for reading all of the assigned textbook chapters and any additional material discussed and/or posted on the Vista website (see attached schedule).  Make-up exams will only be given for University approved absences.  Students must bring their UCONN photo identification to class exams.

SOFTWARE PRACTICAL EXAM:  In addition to the two written exams, students must complete a hands-on lab practical that will test their proficiency with the Microsoft Office software.  This test will comprise 20% of the course grade.  The software practical exam will consist of an in-class project. The exam will take approximately one hour and will include material from the MS Office projects covered during the semester.   

SOFTWARE PROJECTS: A new software project will be posted on Monday and Thursday every week and its solution will be posted two days after that. These projects will not be considered for final grades of students; however, students must do these projects regularly as the final Software Practical Exam will be based on these projects.

ONLINE QUIZZES: To enforce more systematic approach to studying, I will post five online quizzes on Vista. The quizzes will cover only the material covered in the McKeown textbook (textbook 1 listed above) and supplemental material posted on Vista web site. Each student is required to take quizzes. These quizzes will consist of multiple-choice and true-false questions. The dates of quizzes and the last submission dates are given below in the schedule. 

FINAL GRADE WEIGHTING:

Two written exams	30% each  (60% total)
Practical Exam	20%
Quizzes	20%

 

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: All exams will be carefully monitored and multiple exam versions will be used.   If any academic misconduct is discovered, I will seek the strongest sanctions available.  Please become familiar with the University’s conduct code so that you know and understand your rights and responsibilities.

BADM 260 SCHEDULE (SUBJECT TO MINOR CHANGE):

Week starting:	Information Technology & The Network Economy	MS Office 2003 Assignment
In-Class Introductory Session on 9-Jul-07, 11 AM, OPIM Seminar Room, School of Business, UConn, Storrs
9-Jul-07	Chapter 1	Essential Introduction to Computers Introduction to Windows XP and Office 2003
12-Jul-07	Chapter 2 & 3	Word Project 1 & 2
16-Jul-07	Chapter 4	PowerPoint Project 1
19-Jul-07	Chapter 5	PowerPoint Project 2
23-Jul-07	Chapter 6	Excel Project 1
30-Jul-07	Chapter 8	Excel Project 3
2-Aug-07	Chapter 9	Access Project 1
6-Aug-07	Chapter 10	Access Project 2
9-Aug-07	Chapter 11	Access Project 3
13-Aug-07	Chapter 12
15-Aug-07	Review Session

Tentative Exam Schedule and Material covered:

26-Jul-07

Midterm Exam (Material covered- Ch. 1- 6 )

16-Aug-07

Final Exam (Material covered- Ch. 7-12 ) Practical Exam (Material covered- All projects)

Blog, Blogger and the Firm: an Analysis of Firm Policies

I submitted this paper (post heading) to an A level journal few months back. Link to this paper on SSRN is here.

I also received a funding from Networks, Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications (“NET”) Institute to complete this project.

Prof. Gopal and Prof. Sanakaranarayanan are co-authors on this paper. Now when this paper has reached half way to its final destination, I have started working on the other papers of my dissertation. The journey to this submission was full of challenges and fun. I learnt a lot of econometrics to complete the analysis in this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented in WITS 2006 and since then a lot of improvements have been made in this paper. My experience at WITS was great and I received good feedback on this paper. Based on the feedback, this paper has incorporated several substantive improvements, which include:

1) Endogeneity and Unobserved heterogeneity concerns are addressed;
2) Stability of estimates has been checked with and without control variables;
3) Illustration of policy implementation;
4) Number of observations analyzed is increased from 182 to 1001;
5) Additional competing econometric specifications have been considered;
6) Multicollinearity concerns for interaction term have been addressed; and
7) Theoretical explanation is much more elaborate and discusses how our approach is different from and adds to the current literature.If you have any suggestions on this paper, then please drop me an email.

Rohit Aggarwal

Record and play how users use your site

Dion Almaer explains about Robot Replay:

“Robot Replay: Watch your users via Ajax  —  Robot Replay is a Rails application written by Nitobi that allows you to record how your users use your site, and play it back later.  —  You include a piece of JavaScript on your site, and then user events are chunked, and sent up to RobotReplay every now and then. ”

 This would be an interesting application for website designers, SEOs and even researchers.