Today’s blog is all about how to design and create a business analytics programme at a university, Dr Salimeh
Mohammad kindly offered to share her experiences of designing a Business Analytics and Data Science programme at Warwick Business School in the United
Kingdom. Salimeh is an Associate
Professor at Warwick Business School, and she gave us a live talk about her approach to designing the curriculum, the course contents, teaching methods, and student
support. A recording of the talk is available on our YouTube Channel ..
In the following article Dr Chris Davies from Bangor Business School has summarised Salimeh's talk, boiling down all of those tips and tricks we might find useful. So, if you’re an academic who is also designing a business analytics program this talk is for you.
The first step in designing the programme is to have a clear definition of what analytics, and thus business analytics, is. Salimeh’s definition enables the broad learning outcome to be established, in this case “...empowering students to learn how to solve business problems using analytics through specific tools and techniques in leveraging and manipulating data…”. This broad learning outcome forms the heart of the Business Analytics programme.
Salimeh takes a systems perspective when designing programmes, in this case the MSc Business Analytics Programme is the system with its own unique identity. What is that Identity you ask? It has an educational nature, and a modular structure, it refers to business studies and analytics, it has entry requirements, it involves handling and managing social agents etc. It has functional, social and relational components. This identity shapes the space within which the key stakeholders agree together to take on the challenges and successes of the system (the MSc programme). Who are the stakeholders? They could be the students themselves, the programme director, the teaching team, the administration team, the learning support team, the quality assurance team, employability, and the marketing and recruitment teams. All of these stakeholders perform various different roles, and work towards the success of the programme. The challenge at this stage is for the programme director to take on the responsibility of coordinating all those different stakeholder activities to work towards the eventual success of the programme.
Okay, so the programme has been coordinated and set up, now how does the programme director go about managing the programme? The process starts off in August when the director will most likely receive an email from the administration team giving details about the new cohort of students for the year. Salimeh uses an approach developed by Susman and Evered called the Cyclical Model for Action Management. This has five key stages; Diagnosing, action planning, action taking, evaluating, and specifying the learning gained from the process.
In the diagnosis stage the programme is studied as a system and its structures. This would include the term structure, the modules, the module leaders, timetable etc. Having to hand the previous years module and programme reviews helps to highlight areas of success and areas for improvement. Aspects such as the module titles go towards establishing the identity of the programme and give the students a clear indication of what will be taught. Attention is also given to the demographics and prior skills of the students, to further refine the module content.
In the action planning stage Salimeh welcomes old and new teaching staff to orient them on the programme structure, modules, and term structure. Some discussion is had covering the previous years feedback so that these can be addressed by the teaching staff. At this stage if there are any events or guest speakers, now is the time to plan when they happen, what budgets might be required, and what support is needed to make it all go smoothly. Consideration should also be given to how you would gather feedback for improvement activities. Salimeh gives some good examples of how the action planning stage can look by describing what happened in one year’s delivery.
Moving on to the implementation stage next, actions are split across semesters. So, in semester one the students are given an introduction lecture where the learning outcomes, expectations etc. are fleshed out. In Salimeh’s programme they also utilise DataCamp in the early part of semester one. The sharing of information about the modules and aspects like office hours are given at the start of the semester. In semester two the focus is on guiding the students to select their optional modules wisely, as well as organising any extra-curricular activities (if you are lucky enough to have a budget for this!). In the third semester the focus is on allocating project supervisors, although if this can be done in semester two that would be better. Working with the administration team and the module leaders is also important, especially when designing assessments.
For the evaluation stage there are four main approaches that can be used. You could pop into a lecture towards the end of it and speaking with the students, focus groups can also be used to elicit more in-depth understanding. Module evaluations can be used, but you need to encourage the students to fill them in with regular prompts in lectures to do so. Likewise, a quality assurance programme review can also highlight areas for improvement, in particular with assessments.
The learning phase takes all these different evaluation methods and analyses the outputs to spot themes and areas of concern for the students. The learning done then feeds into improving the programme for the following academic years student cohorts.
Looking towards the future, Salimeh discusses the possible impacts of generative AI on business analytics programmes. Generative AI is an innovation, but is it disruptive? Salimeh highlights how an innovation like generative AI can have the potential to change the identity of the system (the programme). Which leads to two possible options for the programme, we could change the identity of the programme to accommodate the innovation, or we could maintain the identity of the programme by selectively “forgetting” or reframing those innovative practices. Practically, this could be designing a module that introduces generative AI, adapting the programming modules to cover generative AI, or by creating a whole new programme.
So, designing a programme isn’t just the creation of the modules and
allocating teaching staff. It is also
about managing the wide variety of stakeholders to coordinate the goal of
running a successful programme. And
importantly, it is also about evaluating each delivery of the programme so that
lessons can be learned to enhance the programme for the following years
students.