Incorporating Analytics into a Business Process Modelling Course

Embedding analytics is about integrating data analytics into operational systems that are part of an organization’s business processes. Currently, most organizations focus on automation business processes and enhancing productivity. However, going forward, in order to stay competitive, organizations have to go beyond automating their processes, by making them more intelligent, by embedding analytics into their processes and business applications. Therefore, there is need for enhancing the knowledge and skills of BPM professionals with know-how on improving a business process by embedding analytics into the workflow. In this paper contribution, the authors share their experience on how an existing process modelling, analysis and solution designing course was modified in order to incorporate the analytics component. The paper describes in detail the content, pedagogy, and lessons learned when introducing analytics into an existing business process modelling course. Thus providing one pathway for IS professors to adapt their current process modelling, enterprise systems and BPM courses to include analytics

Designing a Datawarehousing and Business Analytics Course Using Experiential Learning Pedagogy

Experiential learning refers to learning from experience or learning by doing. Universities have explored various forms for implementing experiential learning such as apprenticeships, internships, cooperative education, practicums, service learning, job shadowing, fellowships and community activities. However, very little has been done in systematically trying to integrate experiential learning to the main stream academic curriculum. Over the last two years, at the authors’ university, a new program titled UNI-X was launched to achieve this. Combining academic curriculum with experiential learning pedagogy, provides a challenging environment for students to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to tackle real world problems and issues through inter-disciplinary approaches and activities. A course designated as UNI-X involves external partners from corporate, non-profit or government-sector organisations. The course requires the student to learn knowledge and skills during the classroom sessions and then to apply them in solving a real-world project proposed by the partners. The instructor along with the industry partner plays an active role in the project design, mentoring and assessment. In this paper contribution, the authors share their experience in designing a Data Warehousing and Business Analytics (DWBA) course to include experiential learning activities. The paper describes in detail the content, pedagogy, in-course project, challenges and lessons learned when introducing experiential learning into an existing course. Thus providing one pathway for Information Systems (IS) professors to adapt their analytics course to include experiential learning activities

Rapid Transition of a Technical Course from Face-to-Face to Online

Just like most universities around the world, due to the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, senior management at Singapore Management University decided to move all courses to a virtual, online, synchronous mode and gave instructors a short notice period—one week—to make this transition. In this paper, we describe the challenges we faced, the practical solutions we adopted, and the lessons we learnt in rapidly transitioning a face-to-face master’s degree course in text analytics and applications into a virtual, online, course format that could deliver a quality learning experience

APPLYPING DESIGN THINKING TO STUDENT OUTREACH PROJECTS: EXPERIENCES FROM AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS SCHOOL

As countries turn in to Smart Nations, Infocom Technology plays a key role in enhancing their competitiveness through high skilled workforces. Reaching to younger generations and attracting them to computing programs such as Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) is a key challenge faced by universities. Many high-quality students from junior colleges either don\u27t choose IS programs or choose IS programs as their last option during the application process. A school of Information Systems (SIS) from a large metropolitan university decided to implement an innovative outreach program to attract high quality high school aka Junior College (JC) students. JC or high school students are those in 2-year program that transfers them to the 4-year university degree. In this project, we took a design thinking approach which enabled us to analyse the output of each stage of the design thinking process and make informed decisions for implementation. Our empathy stage showed that only 5% of top JC students were aware of Information Systems and we attribute this as the root cause of low numbers and quality of applications into IS schools. With empathy study and analysis, we ideated and implemented an innovative camp to bring awareness of IS to JC students. A team of twenty-nine faculty and staff worked on a project for twelve months and we have seen significant improvements in the number and quality of applications. This paper provides useful insights into using design thinking to re-engineer student outreach programs that can enhance the number and quality of applicants to a university program. We share the methodology, the details of each stage, and the outcomes of each stage

Effectiveness of bite-sized lecture on student learning outcomes

[EN] Bite-Sized Teaching approach uses relatively small learning units with short term focused activities. The paper presents the effectiveness of Bite-Sized lecture pedagogy on learning outcomes for an analytics course offered by the School of Information Technology at Nanyang Polytechnic. The methodology involves breaking a typical 1 hour lecture into 3 to 4 short lectures followed by related tutorial/practical exercises relevant to each respective short lecture. The results from the exercises show statistically significant improvements in the assessed learning outcomes for the Bite-Sized lecture over the traditional 1 hour lecture. 75% of the surveyed respondents agreed that the speed of the course materials presented in the Bite-Sized lecture was just right. Majority of the repondents agreed or strongly agreed that Bite-Sized lecture helped them to learn better. Although this paper is primarily based on education experiences made within an analytics module, the findings presented are applicable to any other computing related courses or even mathematics related courses in general.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Koh, NS.; Gottipati, S.; Shankararaman, V. (2018). Effectiveness of bite-sized lecture on student learning outcomes. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 515-523. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8027OCS51552

RENEWAL OF AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS CURRICULUM TO SUPPORT CAREER BASED TRACKS: A CASE STUDY

The pace at which technology redefines traditional job functions is picking up rapidly. This trend is triggered particularly by advances in analytics, security, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence and big data. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study on our approach to renewing an undergraduate IS Major curriculum to align with the needs of the industry. We adopt a survey based approach to study Information Systems (IS) graduate skills requirements and re-design the curriculum framework for the IS program at our school. The paper describes in detail the process, the redesigned IS curriculum, the impact of the new curriculum on student enrolment across the different career tracks, and some lessons learned when trying to re-design the curriculum to align with industry needs. The work reported in this paper provides one pathway for Information Systems and Computer Science schools to re-engineer their curriculum design

Linking Entities to a Knowledge Base with Query Expansion

In this paper we present a novel approach to entity linking based on a statistical language model-based information retrieval with query expansion. We use both local contexts and global world knowledge to expand query language models. We place a strong emphasis on named entities in the local contexts and explore a positional language model to weigh them differently based on their distances to the query. Our experiments on the TAC-KBP 2010 data show that incorporating such contextual information indeed aids in disambiguating the named entities and consistently improves the entity linking performance. Compared with the official results from KBP 2010 participants, our system shows competitive performance.