Evaluation of a graduate level data mining course with industry participants

Data mining courses are increasingly being taught at many universities at both undergraduate and gradu-ate levels. This paper reports on a new graduate level data mining course run for the first time in 2007 at a major Australian university. The course had almost 20% enrolments of industry based participants from both private and public sector organisations. This pa-per discusses the student population and presents the course structure and assessment. An empirical eval-uation of student responses, conducted at the end of the course, is then provided, with an emphasis on dif-ferences in responses from graduate students and ex-ternal participants. To the best of the author's knowl-edge, this is the first such detailed empirical evalua-tion of a data mining course.