Many universities all over the world have had no choice but to start the new academic year with at least some, if not full distance learning due to the ongoing pandemic. Of course, this presents both students and educators with new challenges on how to achieve the same quality of learning experience in the move to online. A number of our existing university partners on the Qlik Academic Program have requested that we provide our usual guest lectures and hands-on workshops virtually, and of course we have risen to the challenge.
We started with a presentation to all master's students within the Faculty of Economics at Valencia University in Spain. This formed part of the opening ceremony across all 16 master’s courses within the Economics department. We hope that many of the students will be able to leverage our free resources to support their studies this year.
For several Marketing courses at the University of Sheffield in the UK, we have provided a fully pre-recorded guest lecture and hands on workshop for students to work through at their own pace. With Master’s students in the University of Liverpool Management school (also in the UK) we ran a live guest lecture covering the importance of analytics across all industries and organisations, an introduction to Qlik, Qlik Sense and the Academic Program, as well as customer stories and demos. For the second half of the session, students accessed the pre-recorded hands-on workshop, but we remained available live to answer any questions. The beauty of this, is that students were able to pause and re-wind the recording in case they fell behind, whilst also having Qlik experts on hand to answer any immediate questions that arose.
This week we ran a virtual session as part of Graduate Plus Week at Birmingham City University in the UK. This session was open to students from any subject area at the university and focused on how students can prepare for the data-driven workplace. And today we have presented to both bachelor and master’s Business Intelligence students at the University of Lund in Sweden. These sessions served as an introduction to Qlik before student’s get hands on and develop their own Qlik Sense applications and analysis throughout the duration of their course.
The success of many of these sessions is thanks to the help that the Academic Program gets has from many other Qlik team members, who kindly give their time to share their expertise with our students directly. This term is also a learning experience for us here on the program, as we run the various sessions and get feedback on what worked well, which aspects most engaged the students and where we can make improvements. But we are very glad to have still had the opportunity to interact with our students and lecturers, despite the current restrictions. And we hope that this can continue until that point in the future where we can get back onto campuses in person.
