Abstract:

A growing component of many business classes today is teaching software, sophisticated software beyond Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office. The effective application of increasingly sophisticated software is becoming a part of the standard business school graduate’s “toolkit”. The flipped classroom is quite mainstream today and is applied in both academic classroom from elementary school through college as well as the workplace. (1) (2) The question for this paper is whether a similar concept can be applied to a senior level course where more advanced and more sophisticated software is being applied. This paper explores one senior level business class and its use of the “flipped” classroom design to try to take the software training outside of the classroom and still provide the needed technical skills

The flipped classroom and an advanced senior level mis class:
The target is a senior level, undergraduate course in Business Intelligence, Analytics and Visualization. About fifty percent of the course is in-depth learning of a software package Tableau, a business analytics and visualization platform. The other fifty percent is covering advanced topics such as data warehouses, data modeling, and visualization.

When designing this class, even given the senior status of the students, learning the Tableau software has a learning curve to it. Proper instruction in conjunction with hands-on practice is needed. However, if an effective flipped classroom can be developed, the other primary topics areas for the class – such as data warehousing, data modeling and visualization – are sophisticated topics and would benefit from class instruction, student-instructor feedback, as well as active, individual and group exercises to work through the difficult concepts.

Fortunately, an option exists online today in the burgeoning market of low-cost (or free) online course. Two such companies are Udemy (“Learn Something New Today”) and Coursera (“Take the World’s Best Courses Online”). (3) (4) Two of the Tableau classes were chosen to be the flipped portion of the class.

The course’s homework assignments, assigned nearly every week, helped the students work outside the class and learn Tableau. Assessment of the Tableau material from the Udemy classes was conducted in 2 ways – through objective questions and with an in class exercise where each student produces defined visualizations within Tableau during the class period.

Conclusion:
How successful was this flipped classroom where advanced business software is flipped to primarily outside the class? The presentation will provide details about the course design including assignments and assessments, as well as how well the class was received by the students, along with the instructors experience and take-away’ s. Samples of the online course will be presented. Finally, the presentation will end with a brief discussion with the audience about their experiences and opinion about the future of the flipped classroom for senior level classes with a substantial technical requirement.

References:
[1] Mazur, A., Brown, B., and M. Jacobsen. Learning Designs Using Flipped Classroom Instruction, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Volume 41(2), pp. 1-26.
[2] Nederveld, A., and Z. Berge. Flipped learning in the workplace. Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 27 No. 2, 2015, pp. 162-172.
[3] www.udemy.com/courses , March 26, 2016.
[4] www.coursera.org , March 26, 2016.

Keywords:

Business analytics, flipped classroom, software training.