Using Collaborative Visual Analytics for Innovative Industry-inspired   Learning Activities
  Inspired by the leading industry practices, this paper describes an innovative learning activity that combines data visualization and collaboration structured around sharing, co-creation and negotiation of departmental/disciplinary insights across data silos, using both internal and external data. This activity was designed within a much larger project aiming to translate practitioner stories and experiences in using visual analytics into educational scenarios and innovative industry-informed learning activities for students. In addition to giving students access to state-of-the-art tools for visualization (SAS-VA) and collaboration (Yammer), an even more important educational objective is to expose students to current industry practices with individual data-driven disciplinary insights no longer considered to sufficient when dealing with complex multi-disciplinary challenges. Starting from a data-informed business scenario, the paper describes the main steps of our innovative data visualisation and collaboration activity, discusses possible alternative software platforms and offers some ideas for the future work. 
Olivera Marjanovic
cs.CY