Learning Experience
What's new with Guided Learning Plans?
We've re-designed Guided Learning plans to be more customizable and flexible for all the different ways you can learn in Maven Analytics. We know that everyone prefers to learn in different ways, therefore we've allowed your learning plan to be specific to your learning goals and career aspirations.
Highlights & Key Updates
Coming Soon
Your learning plan should be the perfect place for you to create, track, and progress toward your specific learning goals. Stay tuned for more updates as we evolve your learning plan to include even more learning opportunities and customizations.
Learning Experience
What is timezone localization?
Your progress on courses and learning paths in the Maven application are now tracked using your selected timezone. This means that your course progress and learning streaks are now more accurate based on your local time zone.
Previously, you had to complete lessons each day in UTC to keep your learning streak active. Now, you can complete lessons each day in your local time and your learning streak will remain active.
Setting your local time zone
To set your local time zone and accurately track your progress, follow these steps:
Login to your Maven account
Navigate to your account settings by clicking the profile image in the bottom left of the sidebar
Select your local time zone in the "Basic information" section of your profile
Live progress tracking
Your lesson and course progress is now tracked in real-time on the Maven dashboard. You can complete lessons and watch your progress increase without having to wait for any updates to the Maven platform.
Learning Experience
What are Guided Projects?
Guided Projects are the newest way to build, sharpen, and apply your data skills by solving real business problems
Unlike our self-paced courses and comprehensive learning paths, Guided Projects give you modular, bite-sized opportunities to test and apply your knowledge to specific use cases.
With Guided Projects, your goal is to solve a pre-defined series of tasks and objectives, designed to simulate the exact types of problems that data professionals encounter on the job.
Projects range from basic to advanced, feature tools like Excel, MySQL, Power BI, Tableau, and Python, and cover topics spanning HR, transportation, hospitality, retail, government, and more (with new projects launching monthly!)
Why do Guided Projects matter?
We've always believed in the power of practical, project-based learning, and Guided Projects give us yet another valuable resource to offer our students.
Our instructor team will be producing new projects monthly, allowing us to deliver fresh, relevant, and high-quality content faster than ever before. We also plan to integrate Guided Projects into our existing learning paths and personalized plans, to encourage a healthy balance of skill development and application.
We're confident that this is a game-changer for aspiring, upskilling, and reskilling data professionals, for a few key reasons:
Guided Projects allow everyone to:
Solve real business problems with practical, bite-sized scenarios.
Focus on applied, tangible learning vs memorization.
Dive into real-world scenarios and practice your skills in real scenarios.
Build professional-quality portfolio projects that align with real business needs.
Explore learning for all skill levels and career goals.
Dive deeper into why we created Guided Projects in this article from Founder Chris Dutton or start learning today and explore everything about Guided Projects here.
Portfolio
In the realm of data analysis, it's crucial to understand the origins of the data behind the graphs, KPIs, and key business insights.
That's why we've introduced a feature that lets you connect your projects to any Maven data set or source data from external sources.
Now, you can explore the original data for any project on Maven. This provides several advantages:
You can examine the data source of a project and draw your own conclusions from it.
You can gain insights from other people's work by analyzing their source data, which will help you enhance your data analysis skills.
You can pinpoint significant data points and explain how a project was developed.
We believe that this feature will simplify the learning process, improve collaboration, and make data exploration more engaging.
External Apps
All Maven users now have access to a Free 60-day trial of Microsoft Power BI Service Pro. This allows people with free email addresses such as Gmail or Yahoo to access all the features of Power BI Service for a limited time.
In order to activate your free trial complete these steps:
Login to your Maven Analytics account
Navigate to your account settings page by clicking on your profile photo in the sidebar
Click on the "External App" tab.
Agree to the terms & conditions and click "Activate"
You'll follow the steps on the page to sign up for Power BI Service and confirm your account.
If you have any additional questions in setting up your account, you can find our help center article here with more detailed information.
Data Challenges
Participate in Maven Data Challenges right from your account by creating a portfolio project. These challenges are a great way to test your data skills against BI professionals worldwide, using sample data sets to uncover insights for real-world analytics scenarios.
Maven instructors judge each challenge, and the winners receive a special prize from Maven Analytics. This is the perfect opportunity to explore new data, learn new skills, and gain insights from the world's top data analysts.
To begin, visit the Maven Data Challenges page and select the current challenge. Review the prompt, download the data set, and start building your custom dashboard. When you're ready to submit your project, click the "Data Challenges" tab on your project creation page and choose the challenge you want to participate in.
Don't forget to share your work on LinkedIn and with your community to officially enter the next Maven Data Challenge. Join now for a chance to showcase your data expertise and win big!
Showcase
You can now choose the custom order that your projects are displayed on your profile page. This allows you to showcase your best work at the top of your profile for everyone to view.
Simply log in and view your profile page
Click the "Custom order" button
Use the arrows to move your projects and select the custom order
Save your changes
We hope this feature allows you to further customize your profile page and showcase your best work.
Showcase
We are excited to announce a new feature on Maven Analytics that allows users to select their preferred aspect ratio when embedding media in their portfolio projects. With this update, users can now choose from four different aspect ratios: 16:9, 4:3, 9:16, and 9:21.
What does this mean for you?
This new feature gives users greater control over how their media is displayed within their portfolio projects. They can choose the aspect ratio that best suits their content and presentation style, ensuring that their work is showcased in the best possible way.
How does it work?
When creating or editing a portfolio project, users can now choose their desired aspect ratio from a dropdown menu. Once selected, the media will be automatically resized to fit within the chosen aspect ratio while maintaining its original quality.
What are the benefits?
With this new feature, users can customize their portfolio projects to match their personal preferences and showcase their work in the best possible way. We know that not all dashboards are created the same and this new feature allows all types of dashboards to be presented clearly.
We hope that this new feature enhances your experience with Maven Analytics and helps you to create more polished and professional portfolio projects. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback by reaching out to our support team.
Showcase
We are excited to announce the release of a new feature on Maven Analytics that allows users to embed "Excel Online" workbooks into their projects on their Maven portfolio. With this new feature, users can now easily integrate their Excel Online workbooks into their Maven projects and share their data analysis.
How to use this feature:
Navigate to any project in your Maven profile within the Maven app.
Edit an existing project or create a new project
Navigate to the "Embed Media" tab
Select "Excel Online" from the embed type option
Enter your Excel Online URL. Make sure its the proper format for embedding.
Example:
https://onedrive.live.com/edit.aspx?resid=99AFFG67DC350E8D!11245&ithint=file%2cxlsx&authkey=!ACkdLK2YG3747!J
Save your changes and view your workbook on the project page
Showcase
The rich-text editor is now available for project descriptions. This feature makes it easier for you to customize the format, styling, and layout of your project descriptions and allows you to build more rich case studies about your projects without the need for complicated markdown formatting.
Key capabilities include:
Text style formatting (H1 - H6, Quote, Code block)
Bold Italic Underline, Strikethrough, and code formatting
Bulleted lists
Numbered lists
Image uploads
Links
Blockquotes
Backward compatibility
For all projects that had previously used the markdown editor, users can easily switch to this editor if they choose. This allows for formatting in markdown with capabilities not supported in the rich-text editor such as tables, or advanced code formatting.
