Coronavirus: How the Qlik Academic Program can help when moving your teaching online

[LucyBannister]

With many Universities globally being forced to close to help control the spread of Coronavirus, lecturers everywhere must adapt their teaching strategies to the online classroom. There is already some great advice out there on how to make the transition to virtual classes. This week an article from University Business proposed 12 tips for teaching online. As well as offering practical advice such as allowing more time in case of technical difficulties, lecturers are also implored to engage “emotionally as well as pedagogically,” and to be mindful of student anxiety levels at this difficult time.

Thanks to the digital age that we live in, there are many tools available to help you to manage the pivot to online. The Qlik Academic Program is just one of these free resources offered to you as a member of University teaching staff. If you have elements of analytics or visualisations in your teaching, keep reading to find out what’s available.

Qlik Sense Software- We offer free access to Qlik Sense for students and academics at any accredited University globally. This means that students can get hands on with our industry leading business intelligence software and make meaningful discoveries to drive positive change using their data.

Training- Our e-learning platform (The Qlik Continuous Classroom) provides interactive videos with example data sets for students to download so that they can follow along with the software on one half of their screen and the video on the other. Students can pause, rewind and repeat the videos as many times as they like making these the perfect resource for allowing students to learn whenever and wherever suits them best. There are also self-paced practice exercises and quizzes relating to each course. 

Theoretical Learning- As well as our Qlik Sense training we also have a product agnostic (non-Qlik specific) Analytics Curriculum and Data Literacy library available, covering topics from the psychology of design to techniques in analytics modelling. Here the students can work through the resources in their own time, or alternatively there are full lecture slides for academics to download. You are free to incorporate the full set of slides or just individual sections into your online classes.

Assessment- If your University decides to move to online examinations, we have Qlik Sense qualifications that some lecturers choose to use as part of their course assessment. Alternatively, other lecturers ask students to create visualisations in Qlik Sense based on their own criteria and assess the visualisations themselves. Even if you don’t use the qualifications as part of your examination, these are still an excellent resource to recommend to students as a means for showcasing their Qlik Sense skills to future employers. There are also theoretical Data Literacy and Data Analytics certifications available for free too!

Professor tool kit- In case you are unsure where to start with all of this, be sure to check out our Professor Toolkit (available in the Continuous Classroom) which guides you through all of the above-mentioned resources and more. This includes demo applications of how Qlik Sense is used across various industries along with example syllabuses to give you inspiration for integrating Qlik into your (virtual) classroom.

We hope that programs like ours can help to lighten the load for academics over the coming weeks and months, as we face these unfamiliar and challenging times. To become a member (either as a student or an academic) please visit qlik.com/academicprogram. And if you have any questions please email academicprogram@qlik.com.

And with that I would like to leave you with this quote from Claude Bernard, which seems very fitting for the current climate.  “Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.”