The process mining landscape is evolving rapidly – both in industry and in research. But our education has not kept up. The “(still) very successful “original” Process Mining MOOC Process Mining in Action has been extremely successful in teaching the foundations of Process Mining to a broad audience of practitioners, students, and researchers aiming to get familiar with the field.

Since then, many new courses covering Process Mining have become available, both from vendors and the Covid-enabled video recordings of BPM and Process Mining courses uploaded to Youtube.

What is sorely missing in this landscape however is more structured education around the most recent, fundamental trends in process mining. At the Process Mining Summer School and at the BPM 2022 conference, I gave two lectures that summarized 10 years of research on Multi-Dimensional Process Analysis. The reactions were very positive and enthusiastic. At the same time, a 1.5 hour lecture is not a proper course. It lacks the exercises, tutorials, and longer timeline for learning, which we can offer to students enrolled in Master-level courses on Advanced Process Mining. Spurred by a comment on LinkedIn I chose to do something about this.

While this is an experiment, I think it is worth a try…

Taking the material I have collected and built over the last years, I have started building an Online Course: Multi-Dimensional Process Analysis. Starting today, I am gradually releasing “chapters” covering the following 12 topics in the coming weeks and months:

• Part 1 – Opening: What are processes and what are we missing with current process analysis techniques?
• Part 2 – Performance Spectrum: How to visualize event data in a way that we can analyze multiple process executions at once over time?
• Part 3 – Detecting Emergent Dynamics: How to detect batching, dynamic bottlenecks, and cascades?
• Part 4 – Convergence and Divergence: What kinds of false information is hidden in sequential event logs for processes over multiple data objects?
• Part 5 – Event Knowledge Graphs for Object-Centric Process Mining: How to construct Event Knowledge Graphs to correctly represent event data over multiple objects and how to analyze them?
• Part 6 – Object-Centric Process Analysis with Event Knowledge Graphs: How to infer new information? How to identify causes of delays?
• Part 7 – Beyond Object-Centric: Actor Behavior – How to model and analyze how actors collaborate in processes using event knowledge graphs?
• Part 8 – Event Knowledge Graphs: Tool Support and Examples. What insights can we gain on real-life processes using the concepts of object-centric process mining and multi-dimensional process analysis with the Neo4j graph database system?
• Part 9 – Key Ideas of Multi-Dimensional Process Analysis – What are the fundamental principles of multi-dimensional process analysis?
• Part 10 – Object-Centric Process Discovery
• Part 11 – Process-Queue-Resource (PQR) Systems: A case study on how to model and reason across multiple behavioral dimensions
• Part 12 – Thinking Assistant and Closing: The next step in multi-dimensional process analysis

Each part comes with a video, open access literature, exercises and tutorials. It is aimed at (PhD) students, researchers from other fields, and specifically process mining professionals who want to learn more about one the most important developments in the process mining field.

This course is essentially a hypermedia online textbook. It does not require to enroll on any platform – but there is also no certificate for completing it, except for the knowledge you have gained in becoming a better process mining expert. Interested? Then head over to the course: it’s up and running.