An introductory COBOL course with structured programming

Abstract

ORIS 316 was designed as a core course to teach COBOL programming language and Business Information Systems to students majoring in Business Computer Information Systems. Students from other areas such as Mathematics, Computer Science, Sociology, Economics, Political Science, Marketing, Accounting, Management, etc., take this course to enhance their employment opportunities. Most of the students who take this course have some knowledge of some computer programming language, especially in FORTRAN. In the last four years, I have taught this course eight times. In the beginning, perhaps like many other instructors have done, I took the normal path to teach this course. This path was more or less influenced or determined by some textbooks or manual references. These text and manual references have different approaches; however, to teach the COBOL language, all of them agree on one point, namely, to present the PERFORM statement, the tool of structured programming in COBOL, in the late sections of their texts. And of those sources which I'm familiar with, none had the structured programming approach. Because of the popularity of structured programming especially in the business data processing environment, and since many of our students start their professional work as a programmer or as a systems analyst, it was determined that the structured programming technique and modular programming concept should be introduced as early as possible in the semester. This has been done in the last three offerings of the course and the results have been impressive. Students' evaluations of the same instructor and the same course were considerably higher than before and their response to the new approach has been encouraging.