This is Blerim's fourth year as a Qlik Academic Program Educator Ambassador!
Blerim has been teaching since 2007, he is a Senior Lecturer at Lund University in Sweden teaching Decision Support Systems for BSc, as well as two MSc courses; Business Intelligence and Business and Artificial Intelligence. Throughout his time as an Educator Ambassador Blerim has done a lot to promote the program within his university, he has introduced many faculty members to Qlik which is now being used within the highly popular course MSc Data Analytics and Business Economics.
When talking about his courses Blerim says, “A distinctive feature of all these courses is that they help in addressing the need to educate a data and AI-literate generation (required by the business and public sector) by being grounded in solid theoretical foundations, addressing real-world projects and using practitioner-oriented tools.” This is one of the reasons why Blerim collaborates so closely with industry, students studying on his courses can expect to gain both theoretical knowledge and hands on experience with tools such as Qlik, “We use the Qlik software and online training on Qlik products, up-to-date demos, Qlik customer stories, and applicable self-paced courses. The latter allows me for a flipped classroom or blended learning format, which [was] immensely useful during the COVID-19 pandemic”.
Blerim found the Academic Program resources especially useful once he started teaching a blend of online and in person classes, and they helped him in moving towards a more modern way of teaching “Blended teaching and learning with flipped classroom methods should be here to stay. Students do not only learn in a classroom…Qlik provides us educators and students various resources for free, as well as short module-based courses. I could not have done the same here alone or even with a help of a colleague. We can be really cutting edge by embracing these new initiatives and connecting different elements in our courses in a form of guest lectures or industry-led ’learnathons’, not just by relying on textbooks of 20 years ago”.
One of the reasons Blerim does this is his belief that jobs and education go hand in hand: “Many of my students immediately or even before graduating are taking on roles in industry as BI analysts, developers etc. In particular, I'm very proud that many of the expat female course participants quickly get employed”.
When asked about the future of analytics and education Blerim believes that that future is in “Cloud-based and self-service platforms, such as Qlik sense Business, so that access to advanced analytics across organizations is democratized, this has dramatically increased the need for data literacy of students within higher education”.
Educators and students can get access to free Qlik software and training resources, qualifications and certifications by applying to the Academic Program today: qlik.com/academicprogram
