The official guide to self-study RA courses from ASU, BYU, UIdaho, etc.

[jch]

Provider: ASU ULC
Course: CIS 308: Advanced Excel in Business
Course content: The course contains exercises introducing skills and features, quizzes testing your knowledge about excel, and non-proctored exams applying that understanding on your own. Beyond lookups and pivot tables, the course also touched on goal seek, solver, macros, visual basic, and file I/O. The course forces you to attempt everything in order; you cannot skip ahead to view later content. 
Each exercise is a PDF document outlining dozens or hundreds of steps illustrating several Excel tasks. Some start from a blank file, while others begin with an example workbook. Most exercises also include short videos demonstrating related concepts. Then, there's a set of ten questions verifying your resulting workbook or asking about the experience. 
Knowledge is validated further in the module quizzes. Then, the exams present a scenario in a downloadable Excel file that you need to complete according to provided guidelines. Like the exercises, students then answer questions from the finished workbook. 
All questions throughout the course are multiple-choice or true/false. Students must score at least 90% on the module quizzes and 85% on the exams to proceed in the class. You always see incorrect answers, but only exercises reveal the correct ones. There is a sizeable question pool, and only a few of the same questions will show up again on subsequent attempts. 
Unlike the edX ASU ULC courses, the modules and assignments are not time-restricted. You can access and submit anything anytime during the eight-week course period. I did almost the entire course during week two. Despite the syllabus, there are no restrictions or penalties on late work. The due dates are only suggestions to stay on track. 
Unlike earlier ASU EA/ULC offerings, which use edX, this course runs on Canvas. You still log in at welcome.ea.asu.edu just like before. Note that you won't be redirected to the proper ASU login portal if your session expires. Instead, you need to go back to the ULC dashboard. Access to the Canvas Student mobile app is enabled; use the QR code generator on the account page to set it up. 
Exam format: Three non-proctored exams, providing scenarios and questions similar to the quizzes but more involved. 
Exam content vs course content/practice exams: The course content is poorly aligned with the assessments, and doesn't prepare students well for the exams. I was often asked to demonstrate a detailed understanding of complex features that the lectures only demonstrated briefly. 
Time taken on course: As with most ASU ULC courses, the provided time requirements are a gross exaggeration. Students in this course are told to expect 18 hours per week. Nevertheless, I completed the entire course in just over 18 hours! In some of the other ASU courses, I could see how students could take that much time if they wanted to; reviewing the readings, watching all lectures, and maintaining comprehensive notes require many hours. However, this course has very little substance to it. There isn't nearly enough material to occupy that much time. Even if you wanted to do more learning or reviewing, there isn't any material for that. 
Familiarity with subject before course: Going into this course, I was a bit intimidated by the course description. I've used Excel less than any other office application by far. Before college, I hadn't worked with it much at all. Last year, I gained some experience through the formulas and formatting in CIS105 Computer Apps at ASU and the data structures in CIS111 Intro to Relational Databases at Strayer. Then, I gained more comfort performing mathematical operations with spreadsheet formulas in SES106 Habitable Worlds at ASU. I think students should definitely have some Excel exposure before taking CIS308. ASU's CIS105 may be enough if you follow along with all of the optional challenges. Thanks to my prior orientation, the first few modules of this course felt very basic. 
About at the midway point, things take a turn. The course jumps right into complex macro programming. Completing CIS110 Computer Programming Design last year at Strayer was critical to my success. Knowing basic programming concepts is essential to survive the final modules in CIS308. This includes variables, functions, conditionals, and loops. The course does offer some explanations and demos, but students new to programming are likely to find themselves totally lost. 
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: 
Microsoft Excel is required for this course and not provided by ASU. Alternative office suites or online versions will not suffice. Some other institutions, including Clackamas and Strayer, furnish their students with free Office 365 subscriptions, including the full Microsoft Office suite. Go to office.com and log in with your student email address to access this. Then, click the install office button near the upper right of the screen. You need to have the full application running on a Windows PC or Mac Computer. This course's videos and main instructions all pertain to Windows PCs, but there are usually also alternate keystrokes for Macs. 
Dual monitors (or a tablet for the readings) are absolutely imperative for this course. You'll need one screen for Excel itself and one for the exercise instructions and questions. Without multiple displays, you'd likely switch between windows at least 5,000 times and drive yourself crazy trying to remember the input data while correctly following the instructions. 
Despite this course being new to ULC, the content appears somewhat outdated. The videos and instructions were recorded on an older version of Windows and Microsoft Office, resulting in numerous interface changes. I was often flustered trying to find a menu or option now in a different place or under a changed heading. 
It appears that ASU hastily adapted this course for the ULC program, starting with a copy of their traditional course material. They left many issues in the wake. The course information and syllabus contain incorrect details, referencing file submissions you won't do and due dates that don't apply. Exercises each have a handful of errors, such as leaving out a crucial keystroke or listing the wrong sheet. More broadly, there are significant issues with content coverage and assessment alignment. Exercises typically instruct you to simply click or type something without explaining what, why, or how. Then, later activities and assessments expect a thorough understanding of those topics. Several steps in the learning process were missed; the brief concept exposure fell fall short of actual competency. Also, I found major issues with quiz and exam questions not addressed by the course material. I alerted the course team to some of the most egregious examples, but there were many more things with poor or no coverage. Ultimately, I would recommend staying away from this course until ASU addresses the quality. 
Be sure to save your files, as some of the later exercises will use your previous work as a starting point. You may also want to refer back to prior work from time to time. Unlike the standard version of this course, students do not submit their work for grading. Ignore any stray references to this in the course material. Note that you don't necessarily have to do everything entirely or precisely because you're not uploading or turning in your Excel files. However, this could come back to bite you later. The course automatically drops your worst exercise. I strongly suggest saving this for the final activity, as number 21 is challenging. 
I feel the course is high on doing but light on learning. It exposes students to a good range of functions and situations but often fails to build an understanding of them. The exercises merely instruct students to click on or type things, without explaining what is actually going on.
My grasp of Excel definitely improved, but I wouldn't recommend this course to anyone seriously wanting to learn Excel. Students with past spreadsheet instruction may find the earlier modules too basic and the later content too complex. People without some programming experience and computer intuition are likely to get stuck in the last three units.  
1-10 Difficulty level: 2-3
Final grade: Despite my fast pace, I ended up with a high A of 99.4% as my final grade. I typically got 1-2 wrong on my first attempt at the exercises and quizzes, then did a second attempt with a perfect score. I bombed the final excercise - that's why I suggest leaving that as the drop one. On the final exam I found myself very lost but managed to correctly deduce all but one of the answers anyway.