Abstract:

There is a need to strengthen students’ knowledge and develop new skills to enable specialisation in the emerging field of Big Data Analytics (BDA). Students in BDA, particularly in South Africa, need to be equipped with technical skills on how to prepare, manage, explore, and visualise data in a world that “does not exists”. Therefore, there is a requirement to prepare students with the 21st Century competencies to identify patterns in large and unstructured data, which are often used for targeted marketing, social development, and business strategies. Students need to be exposed to different types of data analytics and be able to discover hidden patterns from the raw data. The paper presents a design of a postgraduate diploma in data analytics. The qualification or programme aims to prepare students to enter the world of work as data analysts, data visualisation developers or business analytics specialists, focusing on teaching of principles and the theory. A coherent African and decolonised curriculum for this programme is also presented in this paper.

Keywords:

Postgraduate diploma, data analytics, big data.