Sharing the experiences of teaching business analytics in a University course

Transcription

1 Sharing the experiences of teaching business analytics in a University course Dr Michael Lane School of Management and Enterprise Michael.Lane@usq.edu.au

2 Agenda Background to Business Intelligence course Overview of Capability of RapidMiner and Example Data Mining Models completed with RapidMiner Overview of Capability of Tableau Visual Analytics Tool for building dashboards and Example Assignment work completed with Tableau Challenges in teaching a practical approach to business analytics What do students think?

3 CIS8008 Business Intelligence Originally before 2008 Decision Support Systems Decision Support Systems and Artificial Intelligence are not new concepts have been around in some shape or form for more 30 years In 2008 in response to emerging trend of Business Intelligence name change to Business intelligence systems then to Business Intelligence and now possibly to Business Analytics???

4 CIS8008 Business Intelligence is offered in following USQ Postgraduate Programs MBA Master of Information Systems Professional Master of Applied Data Science Semester Students (30 on campus and 140 Online) (Diverse range of students in terms of IT knowledge and capability) In last 5 years an emphasis providing students with exposure and opportunities to develop practical skills and knowledge of two key aspects of BI Building and Evaluating Data Mining Models Building and presentation of Dashboards

5 In last 5 years in this course an emphasis providing students with exposure and opportunities to develop practical skills and knowledge of two key aspects of BI Building and Evaluating Data Mining Models using CRISP-Data Mining Process model Building and presentation of Dashboards using good design principles But still providing a coverage of Data warehousing architecture and data quality as the foundation of BI Importance of security and privacy in a BI implementation Getting guest lecturers with industry domain knowledge like Steve Ivy USQ and Sam Moffat from ebay.com now at Linkedin

6 CIS8008 Business Intelligence In last 5 years we have put an emphasis on course providing students with exposure and opportunities to develop practical skills and knowledge of two key aspects of BI to support evidence based decision making Building and Evaluating Data Mining Models Predictive Models following CRISP Data Mining Process Model using RapidMiner as the data mining tool Building and presentation of Dashboards visualisation of data for decision making using Tableau as the visual analytics dashboard tool

7 RapidMiner Usage Worldwide

8 RapidMiner German based company originally open source which allowed it to develop a huge user base Previous version is now available as free open source version RapidMiner Studio Free Academic License for 1 year runs on Windows, MAC OSX or Linux Easy to use data mining tool that builds data mining processes visually

9 RapidMiner - Capability Supports a vast variety data mining models for structured and unstructured data and supervised and unsupervised learning Handles Preprocessing of data sets Model building Model validation Model testing

10 RapidMiner Design View

11 RapidMiner Design View

12 RapidMiner Examples Logistic regression model Credit Scoring Grab Twitter on Tony Abbot Grab Twitter on Bill Shorten

13 Tableau visual analytics dashboards Ability to connect to many different types of data sets Easily create visual representations of data sets Build dashboards from data sets with different views and drill down capability

14 Example of Tableau assignment work - African countries Adoption of ICT

15 Challenges in teaching business analytics course support resources Free public domain text Data Mining for the Masses provides a gentle introduction to using RapidMiner and data mining concepts Blogs and utube videos on using RapidMiner Tableau knowledgebase provides a heap of support materials on learning how to use Tableau Communicating Data with Tableau Designing Developing and Delivering Dashboards Great Kindle Book Good Design Principles for Dashboards

16 Challenges in teaching business analytics course Student engagement Student skill and knowledge sets varying greatly Students with no statistical and/or mathematical background will struggle in interpreting predictive models You have to get Students using these Business Analytics tools from Day 1 of the Semester Week 5 of Semester 1 student wakes up What are these tools RapidMiner and Tableau??? do we have to use them in the Assignment work???

17 Challenges in teaching business analytics course Getting access to real world data sets so that students can work building predictive models for real world problems Give students a data set with 80,000 records they can t eye ball it to work out the results Large data sets can be problematic in terms of getting algorithms to run in a reasonable time Real world messy data sets with missing values are not easy to work with

18 So what did the students think of this approach to teaching business analytics? Comparative Means Mean Std Questions with a scale of 5, and from the SEC survey ONL Class ONC Class Course School Faculty Campus USQ Dev SEC01: Overall, I am satisfied with this course SEC02: I had a clear idea of what was expected of me in this course SEC03: My learning was assisted by the way the course was structured SEC04: My learning was supported by the course resources SEC05: I found the assessment in this course reasonable SEC06: My learning was supported by the course feedback SEC07: My learning was supported by the teaching in this course SEC08: Overall, I was satisfied with how the course was taught

19 So what did the students think of this approach to teaching business analytics? Using rapid miner and tableau brought a practical experience to learning this subject. Being able to apply the theory to real world examples using real world software made the learning so much easier and enjoyable. The zoom webinars he conducted were a valuable source of knowledge and interaction especially for online students. When new programs are required as part of the assessment, more webinars would benefit external students to be able to adapt and address assignments more easily. There is a huge gap in exposure to the lecture from external students to oncampus students. If we could spend more time on understanding how to read and interpret graphs and database, it would be a great help.

20 Questions comments and discussion