This document summarizes a preliminary study of online data science courses and open educational resources. It finds that universities offer the majority of massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Coursera, edX, and Udacity platforms, covering topics like statistics, data analysis, and data mining. Many open educational resources are also available through repositories like MIT OpenCourseWare, OER Commons, and MERLOT, providing learning materials like course notes, textbooks, and tutorials. The document analyzes the providers, audiences, objectives, formats, and content of existing online data science offerings to identify opportunities for collaboration on open courses.

1. A preliminary study of online "Data Science" courses
Valerie Brasse
22-24/09/2014, Amsterdam
22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 1

2. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 2

3. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 3
http://www.mysliderule.com/
Search on “data” + free: 367
+ certificate: 139
MOOCs -catalog
https://learning.accredible.com/courses
Number?
As of 12/09/2014

4. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 4
Open Education Europa:
http://www.openeducationeuropa. eu/en/find/moocs
Searching on ‘data’: 54 MOOCs
MOOCS -catalog

5. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 5
MOOCs (a few weeks with a few hours/week):
Coursera: “Statistics and Data Analysis”, 56 courses: https://www.coursera.org/courses?orderby=upcoming&cats=stats
edX: “Statistics & Data Analysis”, 26 courses: https://www.edx.org/course-list/allschools/statistics-data- analysis/allcourses
Udacity: “Data science”, 11 courses: https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/data-science
E-learning (a few hours):
Big Data University: free courses, ~50 courses: http://bigdatauniversity.com/wpcourses/?cat=124
MOOCs –main platforms
As of 12/09/2014

6. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 6
More MOOcs
Source: http://www.technoduet.com/a-comprehensive-list-of-mooc-massive-open-online-courses-providers/

7. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 7
MIT’s OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/)
OER Commons (https://www.oercommons.org/)
MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm)
OpenStaxCNX (http://cnx.org/)
OpenStaxCollege (http://openstaxcollege.org/)
Open Education Europa (http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/find/resources)
Main OERs repositories

8. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 8
MIT’s OCW: http://ocw.mit.edu/
Search on ‘data’: 259 Courses, 21 900 ‘all formats’
OER: MIT’s OCW
As of 13/09/2014

9. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 9
OER: MIT’s OCW
http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-9-0002-statistics- and-visualization-for-data-analysis-and-inference-january-iap-2009/lecture-notes/
As of 13/09/2014

10. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 10
Searching on ‘data’: 3968 results
OER: OER Commons

11. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 11
http://dataintheclassroom.noaa.gov/ DataInTheClassRoom/

12. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 12
OER: MERLOT
Link to
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15- 062-data-mining-spring-2003/
2076 results searching materials on ‘data’, different types of materials; for ex:

13. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 13
Tool (applet)
Sample lesson

14. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 14

15. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 15
Subject “Mathematics and Statistics”, keyword ‘data’:
102 results, 18 books
OER: OpenstaxCNX

16. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 16
Open textbook on Introductory Statistics: http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/introductory-statistics
OER: Openstaxcollege

17. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 17
Open Education Europa:
http://www.openeducationeuropa. eu/en/find/resources
Searching on ‘data’: 26 resources
OER: Open Education Europa

18. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 18
More OERs
Source: http://www.technoduet.com/25-awesome-open-online-educational-resources-videos-ideas-materials-books-and-more/

19. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 19

20. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 20
by whom?
for whom?
which objectives? certifying?
which success?
which form?
which platforms?
which content?
Analysis

21. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 21
Universities:
Coursera: Caltech, Columbia U., Duke U., Eindhoven U. of Technology, FudanU., Higher School of Economics, Princeton U., Stanford U., Technical U. of Denmark (DTU), U. of Edinburgh, U. of Toronto…
edX: Caltech, Delft, Harvard, MIT, Peking, UC Berkeley, UT Arlington, UtAustin…
TU Delft / Eindhoven / Twente(as Research Data NL)
Schools of journalism:
European Journalism Center
Knight Centerfor Journalism (University of Texas)
Companies or research lab developing tools:
Google: Making sense of data -> Google Fusion Tables
SAP: open SAP platform (ex: “BI 4 Platform Innovation and Implementation”)
IBM: in Big Data University
Microsoft: Microsoft Academy with courses on big data, data insights… -> SQL Server, Azure
Amazon: Big data on AWS
Machine Learning Group at the University of Waikato: (More) Data Mining with Weka
Non-profit network of passionate people: School of data (Open Knowledge Foundation)
Group of enthusiasts: Big Data University
By whom?

22. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 22
Higher Education, Vocational Education and Training, Adult Learning, Secondary, Primary?
All except Primary in Open Education Europa
NODE project targeting grade 6-8
“Preparing for Uni” MOOC (next slide) for secondary
Citizens at large?
When no pre-requisite needed
To be developed to have citizen take advantage of the Open (Government) Data movement?
Professionals:
Researchers
Support to researchers
Librarians
Journalists -> data journalists a new profession?
Computer scientists
For whom?

23. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 23
Example 1: Preparing for Uni
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/preparing-for-uni-3
University of East Anglia
Secondary
“Higher education is about learning at a higher level: developing skills relating to critical thinking; holding a supported, substantive argument; analysing and using data or sources critically.”
Example 2: Essentials 4 Data Support
http://datasupport.researchdata.nl/en
Research Data Netherlands, coalition of 3TU.Datacentrum and DANS
“for those who provide support to researchers in storing, managing, archiving and sharing their research data(data support staff)”
For Whom?

24. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 24
Coursera: Data Science specialization
9 courses + 1 capstone project => get a Specialization Certificate
[courses free + 35€/course to get a verified certificate]
Research Data NL: Essentials 4 Data Support
Free online course
Full course: online + face2face (2 days) with certificate (€250, exclusive of VAT)
which objectives? certifying?

25. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 25
MOOCs in general -see reports:
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation: http://www.moocresearch.com/reports
Open Education Europa: http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/european_scoreboard_moocs
Conference on “MOOCs: What have we learned, emerging themes and what next” (28/01/2014, University of London): http://www.lfhe.ac.uk/en/research-resources/post-event- resources/conferences-and-events/moocs2-resources.cfm
And many more…
which success?

26. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 26
Some data on completion rates (2013): http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
Which success?
Zoom on courses with ‘data’ in title:
4.5% -21.7%
91 –6500 students
R, computing, DB, statistics,
Data Analysis, Data Visualization

27. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 27
An example: “A Brief Introduction to Data Science with R”, iSchool(the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University)
http://ischool.syr.edu/newsroom/news.aspx?recid=1439
“The class used the free open-source e-book authored by Stanton (“An Introduction to Data Science”) as a guide, and also examined the R statistical analysis and visualization system.”
“While 500 slots were planned, 1,731 requests to participate were received.”
“Of the 839 participating (…) 91 students are receiving certificates for completing all course requirements. (That is 21.2% of the 429 actively engaged students and 10.8% of the 839 who signed up).”
“Course objective: professional development (61%)
Age ranges (of those responding):
Which success?

28. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 28
MOOC: to animate one, it requires planning -teaching team (to prepare and animate) -community tools
Self-paced e-learning: to provide some, it requires a LMS such as Moodle, or a blog/CMS; time to set it up including automatic quizzes, activities, re-use of OERs
which form?

29. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 29
MOOC platforms: Coursera, edX/ Open edX, Canvas,…
eLearning / LMS: Moodle
Blogs/CMS: Wordpress, Typo3,…
which platforms?

30. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 30
Mix of theory + hands-on
Theory = statistics, data mining, machine learning...
Hands-on = tools to
collect data: scraping (import.io,…),...
curatedata:Google Spreadsheets, Datawrapper, CartoDB, OpenRefine...
analyse data: R,...
visualize data: infographics,…
Engagement via
“Real" projects: Coursolve.org
Competition: Kaggle.com
(MOOCs in general -Gamification: Angry Birds, Minecraft, SimCity…)
which content?

31. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 31
Observed content of online “data science courses”, that is to teach “data scientist” skills, matches the description made in http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/a-taxonomy-of-data-science/:
“We’ve variously heard it said that data science requires some command- line fufor data procurement and preprocessing, or that one needs to know some machine learning or stats, or that one should know how to `look at data’. All of these are partially true, so we thought it would be useful to propose one possible taxonomy —we call it the Snice* taxonomy —of what a data scientist does, in roughly chronological order: Obtain, Scrub, Explore, Model, and iNterpret(or, if you like, OSEMN, which rhymes with possum).”
Which content?

32. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 32
Which content?
The Data Scientist skills, objectives of courses, can also be summarised by this Venn diagram.
http://drewconway.com/zia/2013/3/26/the-data-science-venn-diagram

33. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 33

34. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 34
Use resources from MOOCs, Big Data University, OERs?
Check licences
Collaboratively create one/several online course(s)
On dedicated Moodle platform?
On Big Data University? [Moodle]
Follow the “Creating a course in Big Data University” course
See http://bigdatauniversity.com/contact/to get course added
One/several generic courses, and one per domain (social sciences, environment,…); English and/or other languages
Create Engaging Learning Environments?
Minecraft?
SimCity?
Suggestions

35. 22-24/09/2014 OER and MOOCs on data 35
CONTACT me
vbrasse@is4ri.com
@valcas2000
+33 695 025 600
is4ri.com (website)
sometec.eu (blog)