1. Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
Denodo Technologies is a leading provider of data management solutions, helping organizations seamlessly manage and integrate their data across various sources. Our innovative platform enables businesses to access, unify, and analyze data in real time without the need for physical data movement or replication. By leveraging Denodo’s technology, companies can enhance data agility, improve decision-making, and achieve a more efficient and scalable data architecture.
Data is created every day, and it comes in a wide variety of formats from a huge number of data sources. Companies of the future will work on improving the efficiency with which data can be accessed while keeping proper data governance and security in mind. Data helps bring ideas to life, pushes businesses to new heights, and provides insight into a continuously evolving world.
Denodo can help students prepare for careers in today’s or tomorrow’s world. They need to know the tools for the proper management, governance, and integration of data. The Denodo Academic Program provides students and educators with resources that take advantage of data and analytics. This program extends to qualified university educators and students who are interested in using free Denodo software and resources to become prepared data professionals. The mission of this program is to enable students worldwide to be the future leaders in data and analytics. This is Denodo’s contribution back to the education institutions in which Denodo was originally conceived at the beginning of this century.
2. What is the challenge educators face today that is fixable?
Changing a subject curriculum is time consuming and takes several semesters of teacher efforts to be able to have a final plan of what needs to be kept, modified, and removed. In a data evolving world, the need to adapt the curriculum with new and emerging technologies is more pressing than ever. Educators that have a fixed curriculum in regulated education sometimes have difficulties to incorporate to their classes content that gives their students the possibility to learn outside of the examples in the classroom.
However, students are here now, they cannot wait for that to happen. Some institutions and corporations are working on exposing students to real data problems through additional recommended content:
● lectures to understand the real data world problem.
● workshops, test drives, and challenges to learn the practical solutions to these problems.
That allows educators to plan for an improved version of their curriculum while providing value to their students at the same time.
3. What is the challenge educators face today that will persist?
There are a couple of challenges that we see educators face today and will face in the future no matter what we do:
First, as mentioned before, keep up to date with technology. Finding that a new technology or paradigm is out there and then testing the technology to incorporate in the subjects may be hard for an educator. We try to simplify that and make our resources available to the academic community. But still the educators will have to see how it applies to their classes.
The second aspect that we find in the conversation with educators is the demands for practical labs. They have a need for meaningful data that they can use in their practical exercises with students to expose them to a real experience. For that, our common response is to access public sources and find the data sets that can be used together to tell a compelling story. When accessing internal data sets, we highlight the importance of security and governance. It is a matter of finding the data that means something in the context of the class.
4. What are the areas of education or training and workforce development that are being overlooked?
Looking at the areas of education or training and workforce development, we see a common problem on the position of the education community in the data landscape.
There are aspects like data visualization and data quality that are showed to students regardless of their business or information technology (IT) role. Visual aspects are easy to demonstrate and to help your students learn. Let’s say they are more approachable for final users.
We think that what is being more overlooked is the part of the data management that happens before the visualization. That means the full data product lifecycle, from the initial needed steps (data discovery, design, implementation, deployment) to the consumer (where the visualization will happen) and monitor. And of course, that will need to include security and management.
Nowadays, data does not just reside in a database or data warehouse that you can plug into your business intelligence (BI) tool. Data is everywhere. Students need to learn that to understand their future employer data landscape. Some tools are included in the curriculum, specific to some particular case, but a holistic approach to data strategy is not being covered through all the institutions.
5. What do you foresee will be a challenge in education in three to five years?
The biggest challenge that we foresee in the next three to five years is artificial intelligence (AI).
As with any new technology, educators will need to adapt their classes to AI. However, AI will change the paradigm. This means that not only the professors will need to worry about providing AI as a topic in their curriculum with practical examples but also how other technologies related to AI and, in general, how to use AI.
Sometimes, it will change the full learning needs as some things will come at hand for the general public. Here’s an example. Business users will use large language model (LLM) systems to submit their questions to the system underneath that is a database and the LLM will translate it to a (structured query language) SQL technical language. That removes the need for business education to train their students on the technical side to some extent.
However, this will not be the only challenge. Another important aspect is regulation and security.
Back to AI, ethical and moral conversations are going on. Privacy, security, and legal policies will come as an outcome of these conversations. All sorts of AI regulation will start to be developed in the upcoming years.
But not only for AI. Many others are coming into the picture. Privacy has been the trend in the last years and will continue to lead the way as more and more countries and regions define their own policies.
And we are starting to see ESG initiatives provoke changes. We have examples in Australia and EU laws with climate reporting for companies, and we can anticipate that others with ESG in mind will be coming not just for climate change, but also for social responsibility and governance. This is just starting.
Bringing students up to speed on these legal changes as well as how they affect data will be key. They will have implications in corporate data usage and students need to be aware of them.
