Teaching data warehouses in collaboration with industry :Bridging the expectations gap

The aim of this paper is to report on collaboration between academia and industry. The paper starts with a discussion on why collaboration is necessary, focusing on the expectations gap between the needs of industry and the academic preparation or abilities of recently graduated students. If planned correctly, collaboration can be to the advantage of the university, the students and industry. This paper reports on collaboration between industry and academia in a data warehouse module. A discussion is given on the research methodology that was followed for this study and the results of the research. The conclusion is that students were very positive, especially about the practical component of the module. They felt that, in completing the practical component of the module, they got real understanding of the process and a realistic view of the actual amount of work it takes to develop a data warehouse. This would have been difficult to achieve without using actual data and problems from industry. Feedback received from industry could also be used to improve the module.