Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota and Wiley Education Services are collaborating to develop prototypes for learning modules targeted towards business professionals across industries that dovetail with content from Saint Mary’s newly launched online Master of Science in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics program and fill a real-time market need.
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota and Wiley Education Services, an organization that partners closely with higher education institutions to develop tailored services and solutions, are collaborating to develop prototypes for learning modules targeted towards business professionals across industries that dovetail with content from Saint Mary’s newly launched online Master of Science in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics (MSBIDA) program. The online MSBIDA degree is an experiential program that delivers data governance and visualization skills that hiring managers notice immediately. While the courses in the program focus efforts on learning how to pull, assess and present data, they also teach students how to be successful as they work around the daily challenges that are a part of working with big data. As a result, the hypothesis is that the topic area and content of this program lends itself particularly well to being “modularized,” or chunked into smaller sections of stand-alone content that can then be taken individually or in combination for the purposes of professional development, micro-certification, and/or graduate school credit hours. Due to the ever-evolving nature of the business intelligence and data analytics fields, this approach can address real-time needs of the market through smaller, and more easily consumable content for working professionals. As a result, the primary target audiences for these modules are sales people, managers, executives, and other key staff that could benefit from a stronger understanding of data science basics and how data impacts and intersects with other core parts of business (marketing, merchandising, finance, etc.), as well as data scientists with access to a significant amount of data impacting business decisions and their managers.
In order to test this hypothesis, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota and Wiley Education Services convened an internal team of leaders and expert in business intelligence and data analytics, graduate curriculum design, online learning, higher education administration, and market analysis/research to determine design assumptions and identify topic areas for two module prototypes stemming from course content being developed for the MSBIDA program. Initial design assumptions are that the modules should be self-paced and competency-based, approximately two to three hours in length for an introductory module—with potential for subsequent modules that are connected and build on content from the introductory module, software/tool agnostic, asynchronous, and textbook-free. These fully-online modules will feature a combination of narrative case examples, practice problems implemented through an interactive framework, expert video, and practice quizzes.
The group held several brainstorming sessions to identify module topics based on trends in the field and assumptions on industry need, and then took preliminary ideas to a group of corporate stakeholders identified through Saint Mary’s University leadership connections. These corporate stakeholders are leaders working directly in the field of business intelligence and data analytics, and whom have a role in identifying, providing, participating in, and/or buying professional development content and opportunities for staff in the field. Saint Mary’s University and Wiley Education Services, in collaboration and with feedback from the corporate stakeholders, ultimately identified two module topics that they felt were most compelling: (1) Telling a Story with Data: Capturing and Communicating Key Insights; and (2) What Can Go Wrong in Data Science? Challenges and Solutions for Business Professionals. The first module will provide professionals working with data and their managers with information on and scenarios related to identifying and communicating key insights from business-related data for use in high-level decision-making. The second module will provide business professionals, from the sales person to the executive, with information on the common pitfalls in data science, as well as practical solutions to avoiding and overcoming these challenges in business settings.
As a next step in this collaboration, Saint Mary’s University and Wiley Education Services will be refining the first two module prototypes based on iterative feedback from corporate stakeholders, and taking them to market through our joint strategy in cultivating corporate education alliances.