Coventry University has a long tradition as a provider of education, tracing its roots as far back as Coventry College of Design in 1843. Formerly a Polytechnic, in 1992 the title Coventry University was adopted. Coventry University offers more than 200 courses, taught by an academic staff of over 600, to 15,000 students. More courses come on stream every year in response to the changing needs of industry and society.
Coventry University is not cocooned in a world of its own, ignoring outside influences, but knows how to take advantage of the expertise on its doorstep. They play a leading role in industrial liaison with companies like SPSS and are proud of their working partnerships with employers, both large and small, local, national and international.
The collaboration of academia and commerce advocated by Coventry University has enabled their qualifications to gain increasing recognition among company managers, thereby improving the job prospects of their graduates. Jane Reeves, Senior Lecturer at Coventry University explains, “The academic arena has completely changed over the past 10 years. Universities now have to market themselves actively to attract students and gain government funding. The self financing nature of today’s student means that ‘job prospects’ is the number one thing they look for”. The advent of cheaper and more sophisticated computer technology over the past 5 years has turned data warehousing and data mining into billion pound industries. However the topic of data mining is still relatively new in higher education circles despite it’s academic origin. “Just browsing through job advertisements now you will find hundreds of jobs requiring SPSS or SAS or general data mining experience. We felt it would be popular module to have in some of our courses”, comments Dr Reeves.
After deciding to introduce a data mining course module, Coventry University looked for software to support it. They were already familiar with SPSS but had never seen Clementine in action. By liaising with consultants and training staff at SPSS’ Woking offices, Jane’s team were given a professional synopsis of the technology within Clementine and how it could be understood by students. They also gained an insight into the processes behind successful real life data mining projects. “More than a 1000 staff, research students and undergraduates already use SPSS at Coventry University, so we weren’t starting from scratch. Clementine also appealed because of its visual approach”, said Dr Reeves.
In order to assess suitability, three staff from Coventry University attended the introductory course on Clementine and decided it was suitable for the students they had in mind. They also thought that the visual approach to data mining would be as novel for students as it was for them.
“Having undertaken Clementine training and advice from friendly SPSS staff, we bought a licence for the software and the photocopying rights to the introductory course notes. However, the module teaches data mining and is not simply a course in the use of Clementine”.
In academic year 2000/2001 the data mining module was put on for 2 hours per week for 25 weeks with assessment by course work and examination, for second year undergraduate students in Information Technology, Computing and Mathematical Sciences. The module requires a knowledge of descriptive statistics. and attracted only 15 students, mainly form the Information Technology degree. However, this academic year 2001-2002, the module is running again with approximately 80 students and has attracted students from all the degrees.
"We are very impressed by the take up numbers for this new module,
with a five fold increase in the first year.
Clementine has proved itself intuitive to intuitive to use for the students
and staff alike and SPSS have been helpful to our cause." concludes Jane Reeves.
The complete list of global SPSS success stories can be found here
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