Monthly Archives: January 2017

Teaching hacks: Write next year’s course this year

As a teacher, you tend to have the same courses year after year. I have 5-6 courses I repeat in various shapes and forms. To keep them fresh, they need to be updated every year – new materials, purge stuff that has gone stale or didn’t work, and so on.

My problem is that as soon as I have finished teaching a course, I completely forget about it until the next time (normally a year later), and then have to scramble to update things and find new literature. While you are teaching the course, you notice things that don’t fly, but then you forget the details.

gra6834-2017_-_google_driveThe hack, of course, is simple: Write next year’s course documentation as you are teaching this year’s course. For instance: I have a detailed syllabus (written as a Google Doc) for my course GRA834 Business Development and Innovation Management (which I last taught in the fall of 2016). The syllabus is largely the same from year to year, but when I start teaching the course, I make a new copy of document (as the figure shows, the whole course folder), and fiddle with it after each class. For stuff I will have to change later, I make a note to myself, inserting the text “zxzx” which I can search. When the course starts next year, I simply make the edited documents available to the students straight into It’s Learning (the course management system we use at BI.)

Not exactly rocket science, but the hack is doing this as you start teaching. Much less hassle the next year…

(PS: You can do similar things with presentations and other stuff: My eminent colleague Hanno Roberts has a hidden slide in the back of all his presentations, where he writes notes to himself about what he will need to change the next time he gives it.)

Teaching Hacks: Using Google Docs under It’s Learning

(This is a new category I just dreamed up – will post little snippets of useful stuff for teaching. My view is that technology should make your life easier and the experience of the student better – otherwise, don’t use the technology.)

At BI Norwegian School of Business we use a learning management system called It’s Learning. As these systems go, it is (I think) no better or worse than any other system, but the interface is a bit clunky. However, it has a very useful feature (which I learned from Ragnvald Sannes), namely the ability to display Google Docs within the page:

screendocs

This is very useful because

  • you can create all your course documents (syllabi etc.) in Google Docs, which is much better for editing and everything else. You can even edit the docs right in the It’s Learning window.
  • you can give the students read, comment or write capability as you please. Giving the students write access to a shared document is useful for many purposes – I use it as a shared arena for proposing term papers, for instance. Linda Rademaker uses a shared spreadsheet for student group formation – the students write themselves into groups, and she has a tab with “Lost sheep” who have not found groups to work in.
  • you can also share a Google Folder with the students and link that right from It’s Learning.

To set up a page like this, first create the document in Google Drive, copy the link to the document (“Share” in Google Doc, set the access rights to whatever you want), go to It’s Learning, click “Add” in the left column, choose “File or link”. Here you can choose various options, but what has worked for me is choosing “link” and pasting in the link. Make sure the “Embed page within itslearning” is checked, write the Title, and there you go.

Certainly has made my life easier, and hopefully made the students’ experience better.

(By the way, this does not work in China, of course (no Google Doc access), in case you teach there.)

Walking video, again

BI seems to have a thing for walking videos – this time I was roped in to walk from the lecture hall to the entrance at the Fudan School of Management. The video continues with Ragnhild Silkoset from BI, Wang Xiaozu from Fudan, and Jan Ketil Arnulf from BI.

The idea is that we “walk” from Shanghai to Oslo, showcasing the 20 year cooperation between Fudan and BI.

And what you don’t see is that it was over 30 degrees in Shanghai that day, and I was sweating buckets in my wool suit…

Analytics for Strategic Management

I am starting a new executive course, Analytics for Strategic Management, with my young and very talented colleagues Alessandra Luzzi and Chandler Johnson (both with the Center for Digitization at BI Norwegian Business School).

alessandra

Alessandra Luzzi

chandler

Chandler Johnson

The course (over five modules) is aimed at managers who want to become sophisticated consumers of analytics (be it Big Data or the more regular kind). The idea is to learn just enough analytics that you know what to ask for, where the pressure points are (so you do not ask for things that cannot be done or will be prohibitively expensive). The participants will learn from cases, discussions, live examples and assignments.

Central to the course is a course analytics project, where the participants will seek out data from their own company (or, since it will be group work, someone else’s), figure out what you can do with the data, and end up, if not with a finished analysis (that might happen), at least with a well developed project specification.

The course will contain quite a bit of analytics – including a spot of Phython and R programming – again, so that the executives taking it will know what they are asking for and what is being done.

We were a bit nervous about offering this course – a technically oriented course with a February startup date. The response, however, has been excellent, with more than 20 students signed up already. In fact, wi will probably be capping the course at 30 participants, simply because it is the first time we are teaching it, and we are conscious that for the first time, 30 is more than enough, as we will be doing everything for the first time and undoubtedly change many things as we go along.

If you can’t do the course this year – here are a few stating pointers to whet your appetite:

  • Big Data is difficult to define. This is always the case with fashionable monikers – for instance, how big is “big”? – but good ol’ Wikipedia comes to the rescue, with an excellent introductory article on the concept. For me, Big Data has always been about having the entire data set instead of a sample (i.e., n = p), but I can certainly see the other dimensions of delineation suggested here.
  • Data analytics can be very profitable (PDF), but few companies manage to really mine their data for insights and actions. That’s great – more upside for those who really wants to do it!
  • Data may be big but often is bad, causing data scientists to spend most of their time fixing errors, cleaning things up and, in general, preparing for analytics rather than the analysis itself. Sometimes you can almost smell that the data is bad – I recommend The Quartz guide to bad data as a great list of indicators that something is amiss.
  • Data scientists are few, far between and expensive. There is a severe shortage of people with data analysis skills in Norway and elsewhere, and the educational systems (yours truly excepted, of course) is not responding. Good analysts are expensive. Cheap analysts – well, you get what you pay for. And, quite possibly, some analytics you may like, but not what you ought to get.
  • There is lots of data, but a shortage of models. Though you may have the data and the data scientists, that does not mean that you have good models. It is actually a problem that as soon as you have numbers – even though they are bad – they become a focal point for decision makers, who show a marked reluctance to asking where the data is coming from, what it actually means, and how the constructed models have materialised.

And with that – if you are a participant, I look forward to seeing you in February. If you are not – well, you better boogie over to BIs web pages and sign up.