Concluding the First DataWhys Online Course

28 Nov 2020 . Category . Comments #research #education-research #datawhys #data-science #machine-learning #programming #statistics #service #outreach

We just concluded our first online course, with 15 participants!

This 20-week course was based on the notebook portion of our 2020 internship program.

Each week, we released a module corresponding to the morning/afternoon notebooks from the internship. As in the internship, these notebooks were hosted on GitHub and distributed using nbgitpuller links for our JupyterHub. Of course we updated the notebooks with various improvements along the way :)

Course communication similarly followed our internship model and used Slack. Somewhat surprisingly, we didn’t get as much usage of Slack as we did during the internship, but perhaps that makes sense given greater independence/asynchronicity of participants.

Overall the feedback from participants, which we collected from anonymous surveys, was very positive. However, as is common in free online courses (like MOOCS), only a small percentage of participants completed all of the modules. We’ll be taking a close look at attrition and how to mitigate it in future courses.

The DataWhys Project and internship are supported by the National Science Foundation through Grant 1918751 for to the University of Memphis.