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As the members of a scholarly community, we must enable our students to explore, understand, and raise critical questions regarding COVID-19. We should develop our homework, projects, and assignments around the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I am giving one example of how I changed my course content and incorporated pandemic data into my course material.

I teach Intro. to Business Information Systems course. The course is very hands-on, and I teach a variety of software in this course (MS Excel/MS Access/Tableau). The final project has to be developed using Tableau software. Usually, I ask my students to build the final project using the sample dataset provided by Tableau, "US Supermarkets". However, last semester (Spring 2020), I asked my students to use the publicly available COVID-19 cases dataset.

Advantages of Using Pandemic Data

I saw many advantages of using the pandemic dataset instead of using generic business data:

• Some students told me it was the most relevant and impactful project in their whole semester. Some students even shared their final visualization with their friends and family through their social media accounts.
• Students gain a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic, able to compare their city/state/country with others.
• Students gain an understanding of some of the basic epidemiological characteristics, such as case mortality rates, infection rates, and others. I am not suggesting to teach epidemiology literature, I am only suggesting that students should be able to take basic proportions correctly. They should understand the difference between mortality rates of common flu and the case-mortality rates of COVID-19. They should be skilled enough to find case-mortality rates by dividing total deaths due to COVID-19 by the total positive cases of COVID-19 at a certain time (not with the total population of the state/country). So, if they see a piece of misleading or fake information on the internet, they can critically think about it and raise questions.
  • Such as these: https://twitter.com/texasdshs/status/1283177828931051521
  • https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/07/14/state-heath-department-warns-unauthorized-logo-misleading-chart-comparing-coronavirus-flu/

• Students also developed an appreciation for open data, public health professionals, doctors, and front-line workers.

Overall, I think, we should use more COVID-19 datasets in our courses while teaching software, databases, or any other MIS course.

Here, I am sharing my project description, dataset, and some videos I developed during the spring semester. These resources may help others to develop their projects.

Project Description document: See attached.

Project Dataset: The dataset I gave to my students was last updated on April 3rd, but you can access the new dataset from here: https://data.world/covid-19-data-resource-hub/covid-19-case-counts/workspace/file?filename=COVID-19+Activity.csv

Project Description videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dl9cj3krz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu7SPROgwGg&t=15s

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. 

As the members of a scholarly community, we must enable our students to explore, understand, and raise critical questions regarding COVID-19. We should develop our homework, projects, and assignments around the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I am giving one example of how I changed my course content and incorporated pandemic data into my course material.

I teach Intro. to Business Information Systems course. The course is very hands-on, and I teach a variety of software in this course (MS Excel/MS Access/Tableau). The final project has to be developed using Tableau software. Usually, I ask my students to build the final project using the sample dataset provided by Tableau, "US Supermarkets". However, last semester (Spring 2020), I asked my students to use the publicly available COVID-19 cases dataset.

Advantages of Using Pandemic Data

I saw many advantages of using the pandemic dataset instead of using generic business data:

• Some students told me it was the most relevant and impactful project in their whole semester. Some students even shared their final visualization with their friends and family through their social media accounts.
• Students gain a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic, able to compare their city/state/country with others.
• Students gain an understanding of some of the basic epidemiological characteristics, such as case mortality rates, infection rates, and others. I am not suggesting to teach epidemiology literature, I am only suggesting that students should be able to take basic proportions correctly. They should understand the difference between mortality rates of common flu and the case-mortality rates of COVID-19. They should be skilled enough to find case-mortality rates by dividing total deaths due to COVID-19 by the total positive cases of COVID-19 at a certain time (not with the total population of the state/country). So, if they see a piece of misleading or fake information on the internet, they can critically think about it and raise questions.
  • Such as these: https://twitter.com/texasdshs/status/1283177828931051521
  • https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/07/14/state-heath-department-warns-unauthorized-logo-misleading-chart-comparing-coronavirus-flu/

• Students also developed an appreciation for open data, public health professionals, doctors, and front-line workers.

Overall, I think, we should use more COVID-19 datasets in our courses while teaching software, databases, or any other MIS course.

Here, I am sharing my project description, dataset, and some videos I developed during the spring semester. These resources may help others to develop their projects.

Project Description document: See attached.

Project Dataset: The dataset I gave to my students was last updated on April 3rd, but you can access the new dataset from here: https://data.world/covid-19-data-resource-hub/covid-19-case-counts/workspace/file?filename=COVID-19+Activity.csv

Project Description videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dl9cj3krz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu7SPROgwGg&t=15s

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. 

As the members of a scholarly community, we must enable our students to explore, understand, and raise critical questions regarding COVID-19. We should develop our homework, projects, and assignments around the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I am giving one example of how I changed my course content and incorporated pandemic data into my course material.

I teach Intro. to Business Information Systems course. The course is very hands-on, and I teach a variety of software in this course (MS Excel/MS Access/Tableau). The final project has to be developed using Tableau software. Usually, I ask my students to build the final project using the sample dataset provided by Tableau, "US Supermarkets". However, last semester (Spring 2020), I asked my students to use the publicly available COVID-19 cases dataset.

Advantages of Using Pandemic Data

I saw many advantages of using the pandemic dataset instead of using generic business data:

• Some students told me it was the most relevant and impactful project in their whole semester. Some students even shared their final visualization with their friends and family through their social media accounts.
• Students gain a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic, able to compare their city/state/country with others.
• Students gain an understanding of some of the basic epidemiological characteristics, such as case mortality rates, infection rates, and others. I am not suggesting to teach epidemiology literature, I am only suggesting that students should be able to take basic proportions correctly. They should understand the difference between mortality rates of common flu and the case-mortality rates of COVID-19. They should be skilled enough to find case-mortality rates by dividing total deaths due to COVID-19 by the total positive cases of COVID-19 at a certain time (not with the total population of the state/country). So, if they see a piece of misleading or fake information on the internet, they can critically think about it and raise questions.
  • Such as these: https://twitter.com/texasdshs/status/1283177828931051521
  • https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/07/14/state-heath-department-warns-unauthorized-logo-misleading-chart-comparing-coronavirus-flu/

• Students also developed an appreciation for open data, public health professionals, doctors, and front-line workers.

Overall, I think, we should use more COVID-19 datasets in our courses while teaching software, databases, or any other MIS course.

Here, I am sharing my project description, dataset, and some videos I developed during the spring semester. These resources may help others to develop their projects.

Project Description document: See attached.

Project Dataset: The dataset I gave to my students was last updated on April 3rd, but you can access the new dataset from here: https://data.world/covid-19-data-resource-hub/covid-19-case-counts/workspace/file?filename=COVID-19+Activity.csv

Project Description videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dl9cj3krz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu7SPROgwGg&t=15s

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. 

As the members of a scholarly community, we must enable our students to explore, understand, and raise critical questions regarding COVID-19. We should develop our homework, projects, and assignments around the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I am giving one example of how I changed my course content and incorporated pandemic data into my course material.

I teach Intro. to Business Information Systems course. The course is very hands-on, and I teach a variety of software in this course (MS Excel/MS Access/Tableau). The final project has to be developed using Tableau software. Usually, I ask my students to build the final project using the sample dataset provided by Tableau, "US Supermarkets". However, last semester (Spring 2020), I asked my students to use the publicly available COVID-19 cases dataset.

Advantages of Using Pandemic Data

I saw many advantages of using the pandemic dataset instead of using generic business data:

• Some students told me it was the most relevant and impactful project in their whole semester. Some students even shared their final visualization with their friends and family through their social media accounts.
• Students gain a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic, able to compare their city/state/country with others.
• Students gain an understanding of some of the basic epidemiological characteristics, such as case mortality rates, infection rates, and others. I am not suggesting to teach epidemiology literature, I am only suggesting that students should be able to take basic proportions correctly. They should understand the difference between mortality rates of common flu and the case-mortality rates of COVID-19. They should be skilled enough to find case-mortality rates by dividing total deaths due to COVID-19 by the total positive cases of COVID-19 at a certain time (not with the total population of the state/country). So, if they see a piece of misleading or fake information on the internet, they can critically think about it and raise questions.
  • Such as these: https://twitter.com/texasdshs/status/1283177828931051521
  • https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/07/14/state-heath-department-warns-unauthorized-logo-misleading-chart-comparing-coronavirus-flu/

• Students also developed an appreciation for open data, public health professionals, doctors, and front-line workers.

Overall, I think, we should use more COVID-19 datasets in our courses while teaching software, databases, or any other MIS course.

Here, I am sharing my project description, dataset, and some videos I developed during the spring semester. These resources may help others to develop their projects.

Project Description document: See attached.

Project Dataset: The dataset I gave to my students was last updated on April 3rd, but you can access the new dataset from here: https://data.world/covid-19-data-resource-hub/covid-19-case-counts/workspace/file?filename=COVID-19+Activity.csv

Project Description videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dl9cj3krz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu7SPROgwGg&t=15s

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.