I find new tools and resources to visualize data useful even if I don’t use. I was therefore excited when I came across a 2020 Lilly Conference talk entitled “The Use of a Free Web-Based Analytics Software in an Online Data Management for Business Course” presented by Drs. Scott Mehall and Edward Keller from Bloomsburg University. their talk focused on the interrelation of a new platform from SAS into two online courses. SAS Viya for Learners is a cloud-based suite of resources that is free for academic users and allows access to coding interface. The highlight was that SAS Viya has an interface that is browser-based and integrates data visualization and programming. SAS also provides free tutorials and three online free certificates that students can get for their careers! Mehall taught an introductory course and used SAS Viya to create scenario-based tasks for students to complete: students have access to a dataset and perform analyses to then report actionable decisions. Mehall notes that SAS provides video tutorials and email support. The resources from SAS Viya are not created for teaching, but as the presenters mentioned, they can be adapted to course assignments. The use of scenario-based challenges with associated reports students would turn in reminded me of case studies with high-throughout datasets! I wonder if a case study could be created that uses this platform? The presenters did note that currently users cannot upload new datasets to SAS Viya, and the interactive graphs are lost when exporting as a PDF, the only current option for download and submission to a Learning Management System (LMS). Dr. Keller described how this software was implemented in a more advanced course for deeper analyses and visualizations that result in recommendations. Keller explained the concept of data mining and driving it more to knowledge mining to drive actionable items and decisions. While the focus is on business and data analytics, I appreciate the knowledge shared by Mehall and Keller. I can see numerous opportunities to use the tutorials and example datasets to teach biotechnology concepts and show some visualizations. I will keep SAS Viya in mind.
