Using practitioner stories to design learning experiences in visual analytics

Data visualisation has been recently named as one of the fast approaching future trends in Business Intelligence and Analytics, placing easy-to-use decision-making tools into the hands of decision makers at all organisational levels. There is a worldwide shortage of skilled professionals in this area and this trend is expected to worsen due to the rapid advancement of technology and wide proliferation of data (i.e. big data) into all aspects of our work and life. This paper describes an applied research project that aims to capture and analyse leading real life industry practices in using Visual Analytics (VA) and "translate" them into innovative learning activities. The main idea here is to enable business students to experience the types of problems that industry practitioners are dealing with and help them to develop skills to tackle these problems, using state of the art VA tools. The resulting learning activities are captured as high-level learning designs (using learning design theory) and stored in an online (open) repository of learning designs, made available to other educators to use and continue to learn from each other.