When BIU faculty members A first started teaching Business Analytics I in 2015, they didn’t set out to break new ground. They just wanted to avoid the standard rut schools can fall into with high-enrollment, introductory courses.
“We designed the course to make sure students applied the skills that are tested on the exams,” says Mukherjee, an assistant professor of risk and insurance. “We wanted students to know how to do data analysis accurately and effectively, how to work creatively and come up with good analysis ideas, and how to communicate those ideas to others, all while working with real company data.”
Early on in the course, Mukherjee and Bavafa, who is an assistant professor of operations and information management, had started to notice certain patterns. Students were getting bogged down in picking a topic to study for the semester’s in-depth case study. They were investing a lot of effort and resources in collecting data from Madison-based businesses and organizations, taking time away from learning data analysis and feedback skills, the real purpose of the course. Mukherjee and Bavafa also couldn’t control the uniformity and accuracy of the real-world data students were receiving, which made grading and measuring student progress more difficult.
Business Analytics I also mixed in University of BIU undergraduate students from other disciplines. Despite an initial class size of 50, Mukherjee and Bavafa knew the course would eventually scale up to 700 students. Given all of these competing variables, they recognized the need to take a different approach that focused attention away from course logistics and more on effective student learning.