INCORPORATING UNSTRUCTURED DATA COURSES IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS PROGRAMS

ABSTRACT Universities have created and updated existing programs in Data Analytics over the past few years as demand for individuals in with these skills has increased significantly. In today's environment, up to eighty percent of newly created data is unstructured data (i.e., Facebook, Twitter) yet universities may not be focusing much on this type of data. This research examines the adoption of courses focused on unstructured data in 123 Business Analytics programs within the United States. Overall, we find that about 23% of the programs have adopted an unstructured content course in analytics and 13% have adopted a text analytics course which is 100% unstructured one. Also, 12% of the programs at the undergraduate and Master of Business Administration programs have adopted an unstructured type course, and only 7% of these institutions have adopted a text analytics course. The study indicates that Universities have unstructured content, but very few have yet to implement a stand-alone course in unstructured data analytics. This study is timely as much of data analytics has been structured through the years but that has changed as unstructured data analysis is a much-growing segment of the new data. New programs are starting, and others are updating their Business Analytic programs and can find this information useful. We posit that programs should increase the focus of unstructured learning which would include having at least one unstructured course or set a minimum number of total hours in the curriculum focused on unstructured data. Keywords Unstructured data, Analytics, Big Data, Text Mining, Social Media