Digital Initiatives

Learn more:

What Guides Us
Establishing the Feedback Loop
Improved Undergraduate Experience
Improved MBA Experience
Improved Business Communication Experience
Tech Core
Who We Are

People Skills + Tech Knowledge= Leaders for the 21st Century

What Guides Us

The Eller Digital Transformation Team is committed to infusing current and emerging technology knowledge and skills into the Eller Experience to ensure that our graduates are prepared to contribute and shape the future of business.

Beginning in 2019 the Eller College received funding from the University of Arizona’s Provost Investment Fund. The Digital Transformation team was assembled and began work focusing on pre-business and core graduate classes. A vision for a technology intelligence theme and associated capability building was created and fostered through required courses. Since the team's inception, the Dean of the Eller College has invested to continue the following mission:

developing coordination among faculty and curriculum across all levels
benchmark, iterate and connect across the College
supplement and develop new directed content when needed
create a summer internship opportunity to “level up” sophomore technology intelligence and workforce skills
measure outcomes including feedback from leadership, faculty, recruiters, current students, and graduates.

By using the steps below, we have established a plan to further integrate tech core into our curriculum.

^#1

Clearer understanding of student needs

^#2

Implementation of Level up workshops with Tech Core Support

^#3

Construction of Eller student technology toolkit

^#4

Deeper Integration of tech into core curriculum

Establishing the Feedback Loop

The Eller Digital Information Team coordinated an after-internship feedback survey for all students in 2020. The data gave us insight into critical knowledge and skills the students and employers value. The survey helped to identify technology skills learned at internships, assess strengths of Eller students and find the skills needed to succeed.

Top skills used at internships:

Excel (basic, data visualization, pivot tables, cleaning, stats); Creative (presentations); CRM; Project Mgmt; Database; Tableau/PowerBI

Most helpful skill learned at Eller:

Excel

Top skills needed:

Social media management and analytics; CRM; Google Analytics; Database; Project Mgmt; ERP

Improved Undergraduate Experience

The pre-business faculty worked together to integrate technical knowledge and skills into their courses. In order to integrate technical knowledge and skills in their courses, a sequence of faculty work together to update and upgrade their curriculums.

BNAD 277 Analytical Methods for Business + Labs

MIS 304 Using and Managing Information Systems

Improved MBA Experience

The MBA Programs are concentrating on Technology Innovation. The initial step of integration was to understand the MBA curriculum, often taught by different faculty in each platform. Retreats were held with faculty in department groups to share outcomes, assignments, and insights into the use of technology cases and assignments. The Eller Digital Transformation Team then met with faculty in subject categories (technology, innovation, people skills). Consequently, we learned that Technology Innovation is naturally occurring within our curriculum; now our job is to integrate course technology themes and communicate the technology-oriented learning outcomes upfront with our students.

Our newest MBA program, the Professional MBA, was specifically built on the backbone of the Online MBA, ranked #7 overall in U.S. News and World Report. This tech-focused MBA provides a student with the connections and knowledge to thrive in a tech-forward business environment. In addition to the online coursework, students will experience hands-on learning in the form of bi-weekly skills workshops. Students can expect to enhance their skills in Tableau, Power BI, and learn how to apply these skills to business. With this same philosophy, the Online MBA added electives that provide workforce skill-building.

Faculty are adopting a schematic, developing the website, crafting a curriculum map for students, and designing assessment protocols. The faculty have agreed on the importance of managerial/leadership skills, technical knowledge, and innovation principles as the themes of the Eller MBA Experience. It is the intersection of the human with technology and the confidence for innovation that will improve business now and in the future.

Improved Business Communication Experience

Business Communication is a relationship hub for all students. The courses serve as a foundation for transforming “tech to talk”. Digital literacy is implemented as students articulate their unique and authentic professional persona. The course utilizes custom tech-enabled tools for teams:

building dynamic and diverse teams
providing platforms for collaboration
processing 360-degree student evaluations
assessing performance relative to interpersonal standards

Workforce technology includes Microsoft Business Suite and the Adobe Campus Creative Cloud suite.

BCOM at the Undergraduate Level

In their Business Communication course, students embark on a guided semester-long journey into their professional persona. They complete numerous self-assessments and evaluations alongside their partners, teams, and peers. In an intensive, feedback-rich cycle of written, presentation, and interpersonal business communication skill-building, students complete regular checkpoints of reflection on their developing personal persona. Additionally, students conduct primary research with their developing professional network and take a deep dive into the analysis of their results to generate a Professional Persona Executive Summary, video, and website. Technology is integrated throughout the process as a collateral aspect of problem-solving and artifact creation.

Ava Cianelli's Professional Persona Portfolio

Jackson Freed's Professional Persona Portfolio

BCOM at the Graduate Level

Throughout their two Business Communication courses, Evening MBA students engage in deep reflection with strategic leadership communication on teams in organizations. Following intensive self-assessment and evaluation, students participate in deep dives of simulations and role-plays to further understand how their leadership communication preferences and styles manifest across contexts and under stress. They practice advanced managerial and crisis communication skill sets while participating in a bilateral feedback process At the culmination of their experience, students have the option to create a Leadership Manifesto video. Technology is integrated throughout the process as a collateral aspect of problem solving and artifact creation.

Shawn Casher's Leadership Manifesto Video

Melissa Rios' Leadership Manifesto Video

Tech Core and Summer Internship

Tech Core is a full-stack development team of undergraduate students that learns by collaborating with entities at Eller and across the UA campus to develop applications, pursue emerging technology and share innovation with all of its collaborators. Housed in the renovated MIS commons at the Eller College, Tech Core learns by teaching, empowering the college to thread in-demand tech skills into curriculum in two novel ways: a student engagement-fueled community workspace and specialized training via Level up Workshops in Virtual reality, Web/SQL Server development, and Adobe's Creative Suite. In doing so, Tech Core provides a single point of contact for A students to develop cutting-edge technology skills, and for UA entities to develop cutting-edge solutions.

During the COVID summer of 2020, almost 100% of business students lost “in person” internships. To ensure that Eller students continued to grow that summer, Eller Tech Core developed the first Tech Core Summer Internship Program. Due to the overwhelming interest and success, this is now an ongoing opportunity for Eller sophomores. Approximately 100 Eller students are selected for the Tech Core Summer Internship Program, in which they utilize virtual teaming software to participate in skill-building pillars: data operations, emerging technology, programming, marketing, etc. Once familiar with the pillars, the students pick the projects from Tech Core clients. The students finish the internship with practical experience in virtual teaming, project management, specific technology, and a resume item reflecting their work in virtual business with team members across the country and world.

“Make sure to give tech core team a big round of applause in your faculty meetings. They put together a great experience in such a short amount of time. It was one of my favorite Eller Experiences.”

Cody Hutchison - Summer 2021

Workforce Technology

The team is currently developing Level Up workshops, YouTube videos, D2L tool kit to infuse learning into specific courses. The training team has also taken the workshops to large collectives of students (ie Business Fraternities) for group-based- based learning. The appetite for basic technologies is greater than expected. The Tech Core Summer Internship has added 100’s of students eager to complete advanced Workforce Level Up experiences.

Level 1: Level Up Workshops

Level 2: Advanced Level Up Workshops

Level 3: Classroom Integrations

Level 4: Tech Core

Students acquire solid foundations in business writing, presentation, and data handling with Microsoft Suite:

Excel
PowerPoint
Word
Keyboarding

Students dive deeper into advanced software for analytics, visualization, and brand development.

Tableau Public

Workbooks
Data dashboards

Adobe Creative Suite

Photoshop
InDesign
Adobe XD
Illustrator
Premiere
Rush

Students from 2 to more departments engage with emerging tech and each other facilitated by Tech Core with support from level one and level two workshops.

Spring and Fall

MKTG 376
BCOM 314
ENTR 484/487
BNAD 267/277

Fall

ENTR 485

Skilled business and technology students work with university researchers in a commercial experiential learning environment, unlocking tech as it emerges from the industry.

Specializing in a wide range of technologies including Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and UI/UX Development.

As the Eller Digital Transformation Team worked with faculty across the College, an interdisciplinary Excel working group was formed to build an Excel Certification program including terminology and basic maneuvering; simple data formatting; basic mathematical functions; common logical functions; fundamental lookup functions, and error handling.

Level-Up Workshops

Eller Level Up and Eller Level Up Online are workshops designed for pre-professional and professional Eller students, created and managed by the Tech Core faculty. These workshops are designed specifically for Eller students to teach and improve their technological skills used in their classes covering topics in Excel, Tableau, Adobe Premiere Rush, Adobe InDesign, Adobe XD, Word, PowerPoint, HTML/CSS, and VR.

All Level Up workshops are provided free of charge by the Eller Faculty Innovation Team and are available to all UArizona faculty, staff, and students.

LEARN MORE AND Sign up

Eller Student Technology Toolkit

Students Embracing Technology Outside of the Classroom

MIS Student Named Winner of Iron Viz: Student Edition

The Eller community continues to rock the world of data visualization with Parth Agarwal ’22 BSBA (MIS). Parth was named one of the winners of the Iron Viz: Student Edition competition, just a few months after Eller alum Christian Felix ’04 BSBA (Finance) took home the first-place prize at the 2020 Iron Viz Championship.

Iron Viz: Student Edition is the world’s largest student-only data visualization competition, hosted by Tableau. Participating students were given data sets related to the environment and then challenged with the task of telling a story through data visualization using Tableau software.

“I was first introduced to Tableau in my Analytical Methods for Business class, which made me eager to learn more,” says Agarwal. After expressing his interest to Economics Lecturer Gray Hunter and Academic Coordinator John McClintock, they introduced Agarwal to Iron Viz: Student Edition and connected him with Felix, who mentored him throughout the visualization process.

Agarwal built his visualization on the relationship between gasoline prices and human behavior. “If all the data had to come together to point to one thing, it would point to the fact that high populations and low gasoline prices are the worst combinations to have,” he says in his visualization. The judges praised Agarwal’s visualization for being the only one that focused on the impact of gasoline prices on pollution.

“Given that it was the world championship and that I was competing with students, including master’s students, from all over the world, I never expected to win,” says Agarwal. “Receiving the email saying that I had won was an amazing moment.”

The three winners of the competition each received Tableau merchandise, a Tableau certification package for their resume, and the opportunity to showcase their visualizations alongside the winners of the 2020 Iron Viz Championship. “

BNAD 277 Analytical Methods in Business

"I had the experience to learn business statistics from M. Gray Hunter and John McClintock. Gray and John made a dynamic duo; Gray explained complex concepts like ANOVA in a very clear way during lectures and John helped us practice the concepts using Excel during the labs. Their final assignment was a football game attendance analysis where I worked with three awesome teammates: Kylie Anderson, Jack McCarthy, and Reid Tatusko. We visualized factors that affected attendance at football games using Tableau, created regression models that predicted attendance with low error using Excel, and presented our findings in a video using Adobe Premiere Rush. Due to our ability to communicate effectively, bring quality work, and take feedback from Gray and John, our presentation was selected as the top project in its category. (Check our submission here. Thank you, teammates, Gray, and John."

- Jesus Cordova Corimaya

Who We Are

The Eller Digital Transformation Team is comprised of Faculty and Administrative staff to support graduate and undergraduate curriculum and co-curriculum technology enhancement and innovation