CUSTOMER STORY // TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER SCHOOL OF NURSING
Students See Data Come to Life With Qlik Academic Program
Qlik turns raw data into valuable learning experiences, empowering both students and faculty at TTUHSC.
Effective
use cases built quickly
Qlik’s ease of integration within the nursing informatics curriculum means students can be up and running quickly.
Data
comes alive
A range of compelling visualizations allows students and teachers to turn raw data into meaningful insights.
Powerful
skills developed
Beyond data and analytics, Qlik encourages critical thinking and troubleshooting skills among students.
CHALLENGE
From unique specialty to core requirement
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) facilities include a School of Nursing that currently hosts more than 800 students. Dr. Katherine Taylor Pearson teaches in the School of Nursing master’s and doctorate programs, focusing on project management, leadership, data visualization, system administration, and analysis, as well as a popular and rapidly growing nursing informatics curriculum.
Some 25 years ago, nursing informatics was a unique specialty; now, the topic is increasingly embedded as a basic nursing subject, with data, analytics, and visualizations at its core.
APPROACH
Enhancing the learning experience
Dr. Pearson already had plenty of Qlik experience before joining TTUHSC, and when the time came to choose a data management and visualization tool to complement the nursing informatics course, there was little need to debate which one to choose.
Incorporating Qlik into the nursing informatics course with some initial use cases took just a few minutes, and after enrolling in the Qlik Academic Program, Dr. Pearson was able to build a highly effective and comprehensive learning environment.
RESULTS
Seeing the data come alive
The Qlik Academic Program is now a core element of the nursing informatics curriculum and more, and even nursing students with little experience of data and analytics appreciate and enjoy Qlik’s capabilities.
One module that Dr. Pearson teaches covers cybersecurity, which involves simulated risk assessments based on historical data, while another involves public health informatics and the potential for possible future pandemics.
The ultimate outcome, however, is that many students then begin to apply Qlik to their own projects and work, outside the immediate TTUHSC environment.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
An increasingly valuable skill set
As the nursing informatics course continues to evolve, with new use cases and subject areas developing continually, the access to software and learning opportunities that the Qlik Academic Program provides is seen as increasingly valuable by Dr. Pearson and the wider TTUHSC faculty.
“If students can show on their resumés that they’ve used Qlik and have a portfolio of assignments, that’s another big win,” Pearson notes. “It shows they can think critically, they can troubleshoot and solve problems. You can’t put a value on that.”
With Qlik, the data really comes alive, and there are so many visualizations. It’s great when students start to see things that they couldn’t with just the raw material.
