Teaching Tip A Foundation Course in Business Analytics: Design and Implementation at Two Universities

The current data-centric business environment has seen an increasing demand for business students with knowledge and skills in the area of business analytics. This article presents the design and implementation of a foundation business analytics (BA) course for undergraduate business students who aspire to become data-literate professionals or entry-level data analysts. The course design is built around two learning objectives and their corresponding learning outcomes and features five learning modules corresponding to a recently proposed BA pedagogical framework. The implementation of this course at two large universities is described in detail, including the timelines, topics, software tools, assignments, projects, and student feedback. Upon successful completion of the course, students are expected to be able to conduct business analytics at basic to intermediate levels using leading industry tools such as Power Pivot, Power BI, Tableau, or R.