Educators: How Have You Integrated Alteryx Into Your Curriculum?

[KaiLarsen]

Hi there. 

I use Alteryx in an undergraduate class mostly taken by information systems, marketing, and other majors. I've recently started building the Alteryx part of the curriculum around the Alteryx Core Certification (roughly 2/3rds of the class content is within Alteryx though I focus on explaining and implementing the concepts represented by the tools, the rest being focused on supervised machine learning outside of Alteryx). Last semester, 66% of the students in the class passed the certification by the end of class. That was a lot of work, and I think a more reasonable expectations is for about half the class to pass it in the future. 

[HTabor01]

Here are my thoughts:

How have you integrated Alteryx into your curriculum?

Yes - I teach Alteryx in my Data Visualization Class, but not for visualization.  I use Tableau for the Data Visualization but found that the students needed to learn how to manage the data prior to bringing it into Tableau.  Alteryx is terrific for Data Blending.  It is easy to learn and the students have picked it up quickly.  

What impact has it made on both you and your students?

Students have mentioned that it has helped them in getting jobs after graduation.  They can show what they have done and easily explain how they did it.  For me, it is a great tool that was easy to learn and easy to teach. I do wish we had an easy way to get some things like geocoding installed to get latitudes and longitudes, but overall I am a huge fan. 

What recommendations do you have for other educators interested in bringing Alteryx to their students?

Spend some time discussing things like joins and unions. Explain the need to do data blending overall (I've never had any perfect data set).  Coach them on correcting the data in the source environment, even though it might be easy to do it in Alteryx.  

[KaiLarsen]

Here is a handout that outlines the order of tool coverage for my class along with online resources that the students are expected to have covered before a given class that covers a "belt" or half a belt. I've found it to work really well for the "flipped classroom" approach. I may have a more updated version somewhere, so reach out if you think of using it.

I also added a set of appropriate Alteryx Challenges for each belt (assuming that the student has covered the content in the earlier belts).

[ccheng3]

Thank you for sharing your handout!

[nabilbeit]

thank you for sharing.

i recommend you put your contact information in the document if someone wants to reach out to you after. the document will live separately from this post.

[KaiLarsen]

I updated the document with my contact information. I also added a set of Alteryx challenges appropriate for each belt level.

Here is my contact info:

--

Kai R. Larsen [Leeds][ResearchGate][LinkedIn]

Associate Professor, Information Analytics, Leeds School of Business

Faculty Director, Master of Science in Business Analytics, Leeds School of Business  

Associate Professor (courtesy), Information Science, CMCI

Fellow, Institute of Behavioral Science

Research Advisor, Gallup

Professor, Faculty of Information Systems, Social Sciences, Universitetet i Agder

Faculty, CeDiT: Centre for Digital Transformation

Director, Human Behavior Project

University of Colorado

995 Regent Dr. 

Boulder, CO 80309

University of Colorado

995 Regent Dr. 

Boulder, CO 80309

[nabilbeit]

Thank you for updating it Kai!

[Present_guy]

Thanks so much for sharing these! 

Dan Stone, Univ. of Kentucky

[apmorris]

Hi Annie:

Wow, I am so delighted to contribute to this thread.  I really appreciate everything Alteryx For Good has done for my students and their careers.  As a professor at Cal State Fullerton, in the Department of Accounting, ordinarily, people believe this is a boring pathway.  Not so!  In every class I teach, I incorporate technologies that will enhance the chances of my students' success.  I now teach both a graduate and an undergraduate course in emerging technologies and Alteryx is a big part of the semester.

I integrate Alteryx into my classes by selecting several data sets with "problems".  Some can be structure problems, data type problems or have too many columns (just to name a few issues).  Students use Alteryx with these data sets to clean and extract the data for use in their analytic assignments.  I teach the basic outline of Alteryx first and complement this with the online Alteryx modules. To ensure a good understanding of the breadth of tools available in Alteryx, I assign several tools to groups of students.  The students are required to understand, use, and present the use of the assigned tools to their classmates.  For my graduate students, the midterm consists of becoming Alteryx certified.  It is such an exciting feeling for them (and me) when they pass! 

After completing my classes, many of my students use the Alteryx certification, along with other certifications, to help them land their dream job.  Honestly, there is nothing better than this.  Even in the world of COVID-19, I still am receiving thank you emails from my students who have either been promoted or have received employment offers due to their new skillsets.

If you are considering incorporating Alteryx into your curriculum, don't wait.  The online classes work well for both students as well as educators.  One of the most powerful comparisons is allowing the students to clean/reduce your chosen data sets using various tools - Alteryx, Excel, etc.  Once they understand the ease of Alteryx they are excited to continue to use it.

[amais_AFG]

Thanks so much, @apmorris!  I'm really excited for you, @Present_guy and @ccheng3 to share your wisdom - you are all cut out of the same mold 😃