At Lund University our regional champion Ola Roxendell kicked off the term with an introduction to Qlik for Masters students studying a course in Digital Accounting, taught by Amanda Sonnerfeldt. At the end of this introduction Ola set the students an assignment in Qlik Sense that they had to work on in groups ready to present back to the class.
The assignment asked students to use Qlik to find a solution to Out of Stock issues. Firstly, they had to explore just how much of an impact on the business OOS issues were having. Then they had to build a dashboard to monitor business performance in a clear and concise way across various business indicators, for example, current stock levels, highest selling products, inventory. Students had to find the most suitable visualization for each business indicator and summarize their findings along with suggestions of what future action should take place. For example, what were the main causes of the OOS risk? What action is driving this? How can it be improved? Students had to address how BI could help with these issues and provide a solution. They were also required to explore the limitations of relying on a BI tool, in many cases students highlighted the lack of data skills among employees.
In some cases, students went beyond the dashboard build and used the storytelling functionality within Qlik Sense, embedding visualizations into a presentation that they could easily revisit in their app. The students had one lab session where they were able to bring their laptops to class and start working on their assignment with Ola and Amanda available to answer any questions or give any guidance. Outside of their classes they had to collaborate with their team to solve the task.
Students delivered some amazing work that very much impressed Amanda and Ola. Ola says; “Getting to be part of the course curriculum allowed us to go deeper into our product. They students presented their own visualizations and a report where they solved a business problem related to there field. I’m very impressed with their work, they put a lot of effort into it and it showed in the result.”
If you’re an educator and you’d like to make analytics a part of your course, our Qlik Academic Program can support you. We provide free software and training resources and can guide you through how to embed these into your teaching. To learn more follow this link qlik.com/academicprogram
