What course attracted more than 200 students to register? The widely popular course is “R Programming Language, Probability Statistics and Business Practice” offered by the College of Management, National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU). A total of 214 students registered for the class during the course registration period. In the end, only 70 students could take the class. Even though the students were informed that if the number of course registrants exceeded the limit, a video lecture would have to be set up in another classroom to accommodate the additional students. Yet, 85 students still ended up adding the class. The course lecturer, Assistant Professor Tony Chuo (卓雍然) from the Management Studies Research Center, listed the course requirement of obtaining two online certificate courses for adding the class. Eventually, 125 students were qualified to take the class.
Assistant Professor Chuo pointed out that, “Harvard Business Review once reported on their website an article titled “Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”, which clearly implied that data scientists are in high demand by enterprises”. Nevertheless, for most students, the requirements for taking classes at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as well as the Department of Information Management are too high. He also emphasized that, during the recent years, the programming language “R” had rapidly developed. As of now, more than 15,000 additional packages are available. This class is offered this semester for students who had never taken programming classes as an introductory course.
“As now is a digital era, the Internet is also considered as a road in today’s society. The road is there, but if you can’t drive, you can’t get to the destination,” said Assistant Professor Chuo. He further stated that many resources were made available on the Internet and on clouds. “R” is a tool that provides a convenient interface to connect to cloud resources, access data related to your business, and utilize big data operations and data analysis methods to figure out important business information from large quantities of data, inferring possible business implications behind the information. In addition, it is also possible to present complex structures and trends through data visualization tools to help communicate operational strategies and business directions.
Assistant Professor Chuo gave an example. Using the tools and techniques of business data analysis along with a copy of the simplest transaction record that included only the customer ID, the transaction date and the transaction amount, you could conduct a series of in-depth customer value analysis and formulate marketing strategies. Based on the analysis results, you could determine the company’s major source of revenue and profitability as well as whether the profit-generating group shows a growing or declining trend. Accordingly, the marketing focus could be identified, which decides the marketing strategies and the marketing tools.
One of the students taking the class, 陳冠穎 who majored in Applied Mathematics, mentioned that he had actually learned R the programming language before and applied it in the air pollution prevention mechanism. The main reason he registered for this class was to review statistical probability and operations.李詩黎, a student from the Institute of China and Asia Pacific Studies, said that because of her past internship experience at a semiconductor company during her college years, she noticed that the skills of analyzing data were extremely important to the company, so she wanted to cultivate herself to be the kind of talent needed by companies through taking the course “R Programming Language, Probability Statistics and Business Practice”.
(Reported By 丁識瑜, edited by Public Affairs Office, translated by College of Management)
