OpenDS4All: Accelerating the Creation of Data Science Curricula at Academic Institutions

With the surge of interest in all things “data”, enrollments in traditional data-oriented courses are at an all time high. The rise of Data Science as a discipline has also led to the creation of new courses whose content significantly overlaps that of an introductory database course. This column presents a series of perspectives on data (base/science) education to help educators think about what we should be teaching in our courses, and what resources we should use to teach them. This episode contains two contributions. The first discusses a recent effort called OpenDS4All, whose goal is to accelerate the creation of Data Science curricula by providing a “starter set” of open source data science training materials, including PowerPoint slides and Jupyter Notebooks with Python code. The second presents a process for making pedagogical decisions of how to construct a data management class given the wealth of content that can be included.