Engaging Students in the Undergraduate Analytical Decision Making Course

There are many voices today discussing the necessity of changing the ways we teach, for example, Gen Y studies about the way students learn, employers’ lists of skills they say current graduates need, and colleges that desire to always improve how they deliver information. These have led to classes where the learning styles are more hand-on, less lecture-focused, and more engaging for the Gen Y learner. The purpose of this paper is to give an illustration of how an analytics class can be restructured to address these issues. We develop an undergraduate class that focuses not only on analytical methods, but also on presentation, writing, and team skills. These are all developed within the framework of an original student research project.