Every BI course is organized into chapters, which contain between 12-14 exercises. DataCamp supports a variety of different exercise types. Interactive exercises are what make DataCamp more effective than merely reading a book or an online tutorial. We are continually expanding our repertoire of exercise types, but this article describes the ones that are currently available for BI courses and gives some guidelines on how to employ them effectively.

Conceptual video exercises include a slide deck and a script that will be recorded and spliced together to create a video. They should contain dynamic slides and visuals and a narrative that clearly defines the learning objective for that lesson. Conceptual videos provide a motivation for the topic and explain the concepts used in the rest of the lesson.

See here for more information on conceptual video exercises.

These exercises are typical multiple-choice questions; you provide between 3-5 possible answers to a question along with a feedback message to each possible answer. Distractors, i.e., wrong answers, and their feedback messages should be well-thought-out to ensure that students can learn from their mistakes. These exercises can be used to test knowledge of the concepts taught in the conceptual video.

These are conceptual exercises with several variants. These exercises can be used to test knowledge of the concepts taught in the conceptual video.

Classify: Learners classify items from a list into groups by dragging cards from a stack and dropping them into the correct bucket.

Order: Learners order a list of items based on specified criteria by dragging them and dropping them in the appropriate position.

Parsons: Learners are presented with correct, but mixed up, lines of code and must put them in the correct order with correct indentation by dragging and dropping them.

In contrast to conceptual video exercises, demo video exercises don’t include any slides. Instead, they show a screen recording of the BI software. The goal of these exercises is to demonstrate how to achieve tasks on the user interface. They are essentially short tutorials for the VM exercises that follow.

See here for more information on Demo Video Exercises.

BI courses are unique because they require a Virtual Machine (VM) so that students can interact with the BI software within the DataCamp platform. To do this, we use Remote Desktop Exercises, also known as RDE and VM Exercises, where instead of a code editor, students have a VM instance. Usually, every RDE has a corresponding exercise file that students must open up and work on to complete the exercise. VM exercises are the most common type of exercises in BI courses on DataCamp. These exercises require students to complete a number of steps in the BI software before answering a question.

See here for more information on Remote Desktop Exercises.