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Education Dive
Can colleges launch data science programs fast enough?
Higher ed has struggled to keep up with the surging demand for data
scientists, but a new open-source curriculum from IBM could help.
Natalie Schwartz
Nov. 26, 2019
When the University of California, Berkeley rolled out a new
undergraduate data science program last fall, nearly 800 students
immediately signed up for major, making it one of the most popular
degrees on campus.
That move has positioned UC Berkeley to be a leader in producing data
scientists, an in-demand and high-paying job that requires workers to
be adept in topics such as statistics, machine learning and programming.
But colleges are largely struggling to add or expand their programs to
keep up with the growing demand for such workers. More than 150,000
jobs requiring data science skills are unfilled, with particularly
severe shortages in large cities such as New York City and Los Angeles,
according to a 2018 report from LinkedIn.
"Data science is an incredibly hot area," said Susan Davidson, a
computer and information science professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, in an interview with Education Dive. "Yet there are
relatively few places and resources that currently are available for
teaching data science."
IBM is hoping to help. In September, the technology company announced
it is working with the U of Pennsylvania and the Linux Foundation to
create an open-source data science curriculum kit that any institution
can use.
"There's tremendous need in the market for building something that will
accelerate and will help academic institutions build their own
programs," Ana Echeverri, IBM's AI Skills Learning and Certifications
Lead, told Education Dive.
The kit, which is expected to be available on GitHub early next year,
will be composed of independent modules that teach the core data
science concepts. Each one will include slides, lecture notebooks and
homework that instructors can use as is or alter to fit their needs.
U of Pennsylvania researchers are creating the curriculum by drawing
from one of its own courses that teaches students the broad principles
of data science, Davidson said.
Once those training materials are available, other universities will
also be able to contribute their own open-source content to the
project. An oversight committee will approve changes to existing
material or new additions.
The aim, those working on the project say, is to help colleges get data
science programs off the ground faster and to align them with industry
needs. "It's great to have the view of, 'What are the skills that
industry is actually expecting our people to have in order to do this
job?'" Echeverri said.
A field 'in its infancy'
Creating a data science program from scratch can be tricky.
For one, it's still an emerging field. "Despite the expansion of data
science activities that's really been driven by industry and now is
being embraced by academia, … this field is in its infancy," said Julia
Lane, executive director of the University of Chicago's Center for Data
and Computing. The center, which opened last year, aims to help define
the field, she added.
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