Biagio Palese

Assistant Professor
Department of Operations Management & Information Systems
College of Business

Course(s) Targeted by this Innovation

OMIS 482: Predictive Business Analytics
OMIS 665: Big Data Analytics for Business

Purpose and Impact

These courses introduce students to programming in R and provide them with relevant data analytics skills such as data manipulations, data visualizations and predictive modeling. In OMIS 665, students are also learning tools that enable them to handle big data analysis. Data is considered by many as the "new money". Data are generated every second, but they can't be used unless transformed into actionable information. The ability to transform data into information is an extremely important skill that can set our students apart.

Description of Innovation

Coding can be extremely intimidating for many students that come from a non-technical background. Software, packages installation and computer resources are additional barriers to their learning and cause issues that can demotivate the students in learning the important skills discussed above. The proposed innovation is to embed all of the content, software, and required packages into an interactive book.

The result would be an ebook in which students can both learn to code and run their code without requiring software installation or fast computers. The materials will be accessible on any devices they might have, as long as they have an Internet connection, including their phones. The book will also contain images, gif and automated feedback that will make coding more fun, less intimidating and more accessible.

The interactive book will be implemented by leveraging the learnr, gradethis and learnharsh packages. This model could be used for other courses taught at NIU that use R as a programming language.