Integrating Qlik in the Classroom: What Will Your Students Create?

By Lucy Bannister (EMEA Lead, Qlik Academic Program) and Jennifer Danckaert (Senior Manager, Qlik Academic Program)

Gilles Hocepied and Jeremie Colmant are lecturers at L'école pratique des hautes études commerciales on a one-year specialization program for Business Data Analysis. This course is accessible to students holding a higher education diploma from any background and is co-managed by three higher education institutions.


Many students in this bachelor’s course study part time, as they are already working across various industries. The course is a great way for participants to improve their abilities in transforming data into insights and to directly implement these new capabilities in the workplace. During the visualization module, Gilles and Jeremie wanted to give students hands-on experience with analytics software to upskill students in a tool used widely across organizations. Integrating Qlik into the program was a great addition, as the tool allows users to go through all the stages essential to the analysis, interpretation and presentation of the results.

They looked to the Qlik Academic Program to get access to Qlik Sense for themselves and their students, as they wanted to ensure that students gained experience in a solution that offers robust analytics. Gilles commented, “If you want to be a business analyst, Qlik is a wonderful product because it is integrating the full stack. You have data preparation and transformation, the associative data base and the visualizations. For me, it’s much more complete than just having an SQL database. It’s very important for students to have a full overview of everything that they should do as business analysts in a company. You have to find the data, process it, associate it and present it.”

Qlik was used as the basis for the visualization module. Jeremie trained students in Qlik during class and, to progress their skills further during private study time, pointed them to the free training available through the Qlik Academic Program and the Data Literacy Project. As part of the course assessment, students were required to produce visualizations in Qlik Sense that told a story through data and present them to staff. Gilles and Jeremie were highly impressed with the quality of work produced. It was clear to see that many students learned additional capabilities in Qlik, such as map visualizations and reporting in real-time using the Qlik resources. The exercise also enabled the students to understand the importance of data quality and to discuss the issues that they faced.

The array of work that students produced for their assessment highlights how Qlik Sense allows students to analyze data from any industry or subject, and to turn that data into valuable insights. Below are just a few examples of the work produced.

One group decided to analyze global data on the COVID-19 pandemic in order to explore its evolution over time and to better understand the different rates of infection between countries. They also dove deeper into the data available from Belgium and explored the differences in infection rates between different age groups, genders and provinces.

Another group decided to analyze data from the Classic Racing & Automobile Club Belgium. They performed analysis on everything from age and location of members to the mix of vehicles and profits made at each event held.


Another great application used data from a food distribution company. The students performed analysis at the product level looking into things like average shipping time, cost and quantity of shipping by country.


One final example of analysis produced looked at the evolution of salaries over time in Belgium. Exploration was conducted in four main areas: region, profession, age and gender.

The above are just a few examples of the great work that students were able to create after only 25 hours of training in Qlik Sense. Over the course of the module, students become well versed enough to create some rather complex applications and analyses. The module began with face- to-face teaching, but, due to the COVID-19 situation, they were forced to switch to remote teaching part way through the module. This was a challenging time, but, thanks to Jeremie’s excellent teaching abilities and Qlik Sense being cloud based, students could continue their training remotely and were able to grasp the concepts in no time.

The satisfaction with both the course itself and the solution was clear to see from the students’ feedback. Students noted that “the Data Visualization course was really interesting,” and that “Qlik Sense is not complicated to use and allows you to do a lot of things.” Thanks to the positive experience by both the students and staff, the Qlik Academic Program resources will be used again next year for the same module to train even more students, so that they can make significant impacts in the workplace.

If you are a university student or academic who would like to utilize the free software, training resources and earn qualifications available to you as part of the Academic Program, apply today by visiting qlik.com/academicprogram.

Students from @EphecHE make the most of the #QlikAcademicProgram in their #coursework, using #QlikSense to create visualizations. Read the latest blog post by our own @LucyEBann & @JenDanckaert.

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