Critical review of The UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics

The UBC Award of Achievement in web analytics is one of the first university courses available in the growing worldwide offer of Web Analytics trainings.

I finished the program in November and after a couple of months of meditation I wanted to share my experience about it. My final score was 97% equivalent to an A+ (I just received my official transcripts).

The University of British Columbia, based in Vancouver, delivers the course 100% online. This means that you can follow the course anywhere on the planet as long as you have an Internet connection.

The course and the way it is delivered has many pros and cons. What you will take out of it depends on your commitment, on your learning style and to a series of factors out of your control that I will detail later.

The program is structured in 4 modules:

• Introduction to web analytics
• Web Analytics for Site Optimization
• Measuring Marketing Campaigns Online 
• Creating and Managing the Analytical Business Culture

Once you take the first introductory course (a prerequisite to the others) you can take the rest in the order that you like. If you can demonstrate a sufficient experience in web analytics you might get an authorisation to skip the first course.

The course timeline

Each course last 4 weeks, in other words depending how busy is your life you might finish everything in a quarter (allowing a bit of course overlap). My advice is to plan and book early, if possible few months in advance, as the classes tend to fill up very quickly.

How hard are they?

It depends. If your background is not IT, technology or marketing you might struggle a bit. If you are very comfortable with on-line marketing, the course will be a piece of cake. You nevertheless will need to dedicate several hours per week of your time to read the online material and go through a little bit of personal research.

The students

The classes are quite small for an online course: 20 to 23 persons. As you will see later this is detrimental for the learning experience. In the courses where I participated there was a great diversity of backgrounds.

The tutors

The tutors are responsible of answering to student questions in forums, animating discussions and correcting the homeworks. As you might imagine a good tutor can greatly enhance the learning experience. Here UBC should do a bit of quality checks because while one of the tutors was exceptionally good few of the tutors where not properly doing their job. I had the pleasure to work with Jeff Young, in course 2 (for sure the best tutor that I had in the program).

Few of the tutors were practically absent, not answering student questions and giving extremely concise comments in the assignments corrections (I was wondering if they were reading the assignments at all).

The textbooks

The material is overall good even though it shows the signs of age. A lot of it (including references and external links) is from the 2001-2004 period. In Web Analytics terms this is like studying advanced microelectronics with a textbook from the 70s. In other words do not expect to learn about the latest and the greatest methodologies from this course. Rather expect to give yourself a decent foundation on which to build later on.

Even though I have several years of experience with web analytics, I have to say that I learned many things from this course.

Since the course is targeted to a very wide audience, the technical aspects (like data integrity and data collection problems) are brushed up very quickly. Additionally very little is mentioned or explained about the mathematical and statistical know how that should be present in the web analyst background.

There is no emphasis on the web analytics tools. This is very good as you are forced to understand the ins and outs of the analysis rather than pressing a button without knowing the internal computations behind.

The classroom discussions

Each lesson has several forums on which the students can ask questions about the classes and engage in discussions with their pears and the tutors. Unfortunately most of the students couldn’t care less and you find yourself alone (most of my comments being unanswered). In the end the same two or three students (probably a bit more motivated than the rest) are left to discuss among themselves. This would be less of a problem if classes were much bigger, allowing a statistical number of motivated students to animate the discussions. Here UBC should learn from other universities that have a successful distance learning program. As an example I can cite "Warwick Business School Distance learning MBA" where online discussions are an incredible learning tool.

The assignments

There are 3 types of assignments:

Discussion assignments: these are literally a joke. You have to discuss about a set problem or a topic in an online forum. The first student will open the discussion with a comment. The other students will build and comment based on the previous forum posts.

No need to tell that the usual two or three students that are regularly discussing in the forums will open the discussion few days before the deadline. The majority of the students will post their messages in the last few hours (some of them in the last 15 minutes). The quality of the comments goes from insightful to irrelevant, especially because the last few students in the discussion have very little to add left (everything has been probably already said) and are pressed by time.

Projects: These are by far the best assignments and the ones where you can learn the most. You are given a topic, a web site or data to analyse, and you research and crunch the data at will, using all the knowledge you acquired in the course. You have a limit in the number of words you can submit; therefore you have to be concise and straight to the point.

Drop box assignments: these are more simple assignments than projects where you will have to apply a very specific set of chapters from the course material. You will have as well to do some additional research. It’s a very good way to learn.

Conclusion: The good, the bad and the ugly

The good:

• At its present price the course is a bargain as each of the 4 courses will cost you 675.00 CAD (Canadian dollars) roughly equivalent to 435€ (Euro) (1740€ in total). You will get a discount if you are a WAA (Web Analytics Association) member lowering the cost of each course to 640.00 CAD (check UBC site for updated prices). Considering how expensive professional courses are nowadays this is for sure a great plus of the program.
• The course gives very strong foundation on which to build your knowledge. Nevertheless you will need to complement this course with practical experience and personal research.

The bad:

• The course is a bit light on technical and statistical aspects.
• Some of the course material is quite old.
• Several external links in the course are broken or pointing to paying material.

The Ugly

• The learning experience can be affected by inactive tutors or unmotivated students.

Final thoughts

If you are beginning in Web Analytics and you are looking for a way to build a solid background this is the course for you. If instead you are a seasoned professional looking for a certification, there might be better options around. For example the upcoming WAA certification, that will be launched in May 2010. Alternatively you could be interested in tool related certifications like the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) or the many certifications offered by the big vendors (like Omniture or WebTrends to name a few).

Probably the whole program would be greatly improved by making the classes longer and increasing the amount of exercises. Another possible thing would be to let the students analyse traffic on live websites, for example from charities or willing institutions.