MOVE BEYOND THE POINT AND CLICK Diversity: Students have diverse career goals. To target the variety of majors taking the course, the Exploring series offers examples relevant to every student. Studying Made Easy: Students read, prepare, and study differently than they used to. Rather than reading a book cover-to-cover, students want to easily identify what they need to know, and then learn it efficiently. The key features found in the Exploring series bring students into the content, making the text easy to use. White Pages/ Yellow Pages: Clearly distinguishes the theory from the skill exercises. Visual Reference Cards for each application provide visual summaries and quick tips that answer the questions asked most commonly by students. These are movable throughout the book and can also be used as a bookmark.
A Chapter-Opening Case Study now not only introduces the scenario that the Hands-On Exercises in the chapter are built around, but also carries throughout the entire chapter to provide students with consistency of context to help them learn. Set-Up Videos! These live-action videos act out the Case Study, describing skills that will be learned and showing the relevance of the skills to students' current lives and/or future careers. Professors are provided with exercises to help guide and assess students on their comprehension of the skills while watching the videos. Objective Mapping enables students to skip the skills and concepts they know, and quickly find those they don't, by scanning the chapter opener page for the page numbers of the material they need. Pull Quotes entice students into the theory by highlighting the most interesting points. EXTEND LEARNING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM Compass , an online reference tool designed to help students learn the 50 most essential skills in Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint, is included as part of the Exploring System. Available online via your computer or mobile phone, Compass is a digital, at-your-fingertips resource for tech savvy students who need help and answers right away. End-of-Chapter material offers instructors several options for assessment.
Each chapter has 12-15 exercises ranging from multiple-choice questions to open-ended projects. Multiple Choice questions help students quickly and easily make sure they understand the concepts. Practice Exercises remove some of the hand-holding students had in the steps of the HOEs and challenge students with new case studies. Each Practice Exercise has its own case study for students to work through. Enhanced Mid-Level Exercises includes a Discover Step, which encourages students to use Help or to problem-solve to accomplish a task. This engages students higher level thinking and challenges students more. Other Mid-Levels may contain Creative Steps, which also ask more of the student. Beyond the Classroom exercises are open-ended exercises that ask students to complete a project with very little guidance, challenging them at the highest level.
Rubrics are available for instructors as part of their Instructor Resource Pack to aid in the grading of these cases. They are also in Word format so that professors can customize these for their classes. Disaster Recovery Cases provide students with the ability to identify and correct errors within an existing project, helping them achieve one of the highest level of thinking, Analysis. Capstone Exercises (one in the text and one in the IRCD): Allow the instructors to assess all the skills in the chapter with a single project.