Abstract:

This paper discusses the exploitation of open data in course projects for business information students. Open data has been used for several years in teaching business intelligence for second-year students of business information technology. In a course project, several sources of open data are combined to produce an innovative outcome.

Open data is data that is freely available for anyone to use. The main factors contributing to data openness are technical accessibility, free access, licensing permitting reuse, findability and understandability. Open data may be accessed as simple files, e.g. CSV (comma separated values) or through an API (application programming interface).

The course “Business Intelligence” has been implemented using open data for three years now. Alternatives for using open data would be the use of teacher-created data, educational example data from a software provider such as Microsoft or proprietary data from a company. All of the aforementioned data types provide problems when the goal is to offer students project-based learning with authentic and reuse permitting data.

In addition to giving the students access to authentic data permitting reuse, the students of the course implementation of fall 2019 were offered close collaboration with the City of Helsinki. The City of Helsinki provides the data and coordinates the open data service, called Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI). The students participated in the process of opening a new data set to the public by testing it and giving feedback about it. As the grande finale of their course project, the best student team was given the opportunity of presenting their project work at the Helsinki Loves Developers meetup organized by HRI.

The paper will provide the following contributions:
• A description of the key features of the course project work in business intelligence that is based on using open data.
• A concrete example of a successful course project that combines several sources of open data into one meaningful project.
• The experiences and feedback from all stakeholders that took part in the course implementation involving close collaboration with three parties: the students, the teachers and the organization that is in the process of opening its data and coordinates the open data service.

Keywords:

Open data, data analysis, business intelligence, course project, project-based learning, industry collaboration, higher education.