Develop foundational data literacy skills to interpret, structure, and analyze institutional data effectively. Through hands-on application, participants learn to clean, organize, and summarize data, design basic data collection tools, and generate insights that support operational and strategic decision-making. With an emphasis on practical application in higher education, the course explores how to identify trends, improve data quality, and use evidence-based insights to support informed decision-making across business education. Gain insight into how direct and indirect measures of progress can be interpreted through data while developing practical skills to answer day-to-day questions and effectively evidence work to external stakeholders.
This course is part of the Learning Analytics for Business Education certificate course, developed exclusively for the AACSB Academy by the Institute of Analytics (IoA). Each course is a 12-week self-paced study program, with recommendations for optional support or stretch challenges.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Recognize fundamental data concepts and data uses in Higher Education
- Summarize the rules for data entry in a schema, to reduce the administrative burden of data misuse
- Design an efficient satisfaction survey and evaluate the results
- Clean, sort, filter and group data ready for analysis, including handling large data sets, record your work for reproducibility
- Condense complex data sets down to a few key numbers or visuals to explain central trends and patterns.
Prerequisites
Some familiarity with loading or opening data tables in a spreadsheet and understanding columns and rows is desirable.
Optional Stretch Activity
Participants may complete an optional advanced exercise using spreadsheet formulas to further develop their analytical skills.
Assessment
Assessment consists of:
- Theoretical assessment (50%)
- Practical project: Prepare and analyze a higher education data set to identify key trends (50%).
Program Description
The Certificate in Learning Analytics for Business Education is a four-course professional learning pathway designed to help business education professionals develop the skills needed to transform data into actionable insights. Through a progression from foundational data literacy to advanced data visualization, participants learn how to collect, analyze, interpret, and communicate learning and assessment data to support evidence-based decision-making, continuous improvement, and institutional impact. Created through a collaboration between AACSB and the Institute of Analytics (IoA), the program combines practical analytics skills with ethical data practices in the context of business education.
Continue Your Learning Journey
Coming Soon:
- Course 2: Data-Driven Decision-Making
- Course 3: Ethical Data Practice
- Course 4: Data Visualization for Impact.
In partnership with:
