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FIRST STUDENT-LED WEBINAR ON EXCEL ATTRACTS LARGE NUMBER OF INTERESTED PEOPLE

An unprecedented webinar, where first-year students of the Faculty of Engineering Economics and Management of Riga Technical University (RTU), who have been learning business data analysis technologies for only a few months, presented the possibilities of Excel to an unexpectedly large number of people.

At the beginning of 2021, the future business, marketing, financial, logistics, international relations and quality management specialists, who had been studying the art of business data processing for one semester, led a three-day cycle of online seminars «BDAT 2021 Excel Webinar» sharing the practical skills acquired in the study course of Business Intelligence Technologies (BIT). The seminar was announced as public and open to everyone.

1355 people registered for the seminar. An average of 586 participants took part in the seminars every day – not only students, but also their parents and other interested people. They appreciated the new knowledge and experience gained and were also pleased to be able to refresh their previously acquired skills.

During the three days of the seminar, the students introduced the participants to the possibilities offered by Excel – work with cells, graph and report creation, conditional formatting, application of logical functions, use of date and text. They also showed examples of how to use Excel in data processing and visualization, introduced the Pivot Table tool, and reminded about both long-known features and tools and the «fresh» features and capabilities of Office 365. Handouts were prepared for the seminar participants, with the help of which it was possible to follow practically everything the students were doing.

Leonīds Budņiks, a lecturer at the RTU Faculty of Engineering Economics and Management, had long cherished the idea of a training program led by his students. In face-to-face studies, such an idea could not be implemented due to fears that people would not waste time delving into first-year students’ presentations about the knowledge they had acquired in just three months. Remote studies are currently a challenge for both students and academic staff, but it also offers unprecedented opportunities. Remote communication platforms and the ability to connect to lectures from anywhere change people’s information acquisition habits and motivation. This gave birth to the idea of a BIT webinar, which turned out to be a real success story.

 
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