Designing and Delivering a Curriculum for Data Science Education across Europe

Data is currently being produced at an incredible rate globally, fuelled by the increasing ubiquity of the Web, and stoked by social media, sensors, and mobile devices. However, as the amount of available data continues to increase, so does the demand for professionals who have the necessary skills to manage and manipulate this data. This paper presents the European Data Science Academy (EDSA), an initiative for bridging the data science skills gap across Europe and training a new generation of world-leading data scientists. The EDSA project has established a rigorous process and a set of best practices for the production and delivery of curricula for data science. Additionally, the project’s efforts are dedicated to linking the demand for data science skills with the supply of learning resources that offer these skills

Academics' use of courseware materials: A survey

Learning technology has yet to enter the mainstream of higher education. The UFC-funded Teaching and Learning Technology (TLT) programme is attempting to change this by sponsoring projects concerned with courseware production and delivery. These efforts could be thwarted if the Not Invented Here syndrome prevents the use of technology-based teaching and learning materials outside the originating departments. To gain a clearer understanding of why academics have been rejecting much existing courseware, and to establish the extent of the Not Invented Here syndrome, we carried out a survey of 800 academics in eight UK universities. The survey proved to be exceptionally revealing

Evaluation in a project life‐cycle: The hypermedia CAMILLE project

In the CAL literature, the issue of integrating evaluation into the life‐cycle of a project has often been recommended but less frequently reported, at least for large‐scale hypermedia environments. Indeed, CAL developers face a difficult problem because effective evaluation needs to satisfy the potentially conflicting demands of a variety of audiences (teachers, administrators, the research community, sponsors, etc.). This paper first examines some of the various forms of evaluation adopted by different kinds of audiences. It then reports on evaluations, formative as well as summative, set up by the European CAMILLE project teams in four countries during a large‐scale courseware development project. It stresses the advantages, despite drawbacks and pitfalls, for CAL developers to systematically undertake evaluation. Lastly, it points out some general outcomes concerning learning issues of interest to teachers, trainers and educational advisers. These include topics such as the impact of multimedia, of learner variability and learner autonomy on the effectiveness of learning with respect to language skills

Possible versus desirable in instructional systems: Who's driving?

This paper takes a pragmatic stance that the key to successful application of technology in education is good teaching: using technology only when it is a cost‐effective servant of pedagogy. The paper discusses some fundamental issues in the production of computer‐based materials, and considers them in the context of an on‐going evaluation of an Internet courseware project

Open educational resources : conversations in cyberspace

172 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.Libro ElectrónicoEducation systems today face two major challenges: expanding the reach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutions will not suffice, especially in the context of today's knowledge-intensive societies. The Open Educational Resources movement offers one solution for extending the reach of education and expanding learning opportunities. The goal of the movement is to equalize access to knowledge worldwide through openly and freely available online high-quality content. Over the course of two years, the international community came together in a series of online discussion forums to discuss the concept of Open Educational Resources and its potential. This publication makes the background papers and reports from those discussions available in print.--Publisher's description.A first forum : presenting the open educational resources (OER) movement. Open educational resources : an introductory note / Sally Johnstone -- Providing OER and related issues : an introductory note / Anne Margulies, ... [et al.] -- Using OER and related issues : in introductory note / Mohammed-Nabil Sabry, ... [et al.] -- Discussion highlights / Paul Albright -- Ongoing discussion. A research agenda for OER : discussion highlights / Kim Tucker and Peter Bateman -- A 'do-it-yourself' resource for OER : discussion highlights / Boris Vukovic -- Free and open source software (FOSS) and OER -- A second forum : discussing the OECD study of OER. Mapping procedures and users / Jan Hylén -- Why individuals and institutions share and use OER / Jan Hylén -- Discussion highlights / Alexa Joyce -- Priorities for action. Open educational resources : the way forward / Susan D'Antoni

Collaborative Authoring of Open Courseware with SlideWiki: A Case Study in Open Education

Producing or finding and reusing high-quality educational content online can be a laborious and costly process. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of producing and reusing highly-structured remixable educational content can be crowdsourced and therefore widely shared. SlideWiki employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the open education community in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing open courseware. This paper presents a case study of this platform carried out in the context of open education and informal learning and reports on the feedback received thus far from members of the open education community

An authoring tool for structuring and annotating on-line educational courses : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

This thesis studies the design and prototype implementation of a new web-based course authoring system for the Technology Integrated Learning Environment (TILE) project. The TILE authoring system edits the course structure and allows the author to annotate the course structure with meta-data. It makes extensive use of XML technology to communicate structured data across the Internet, as well as for both local and web-side databases. The Authoring tool is designed to support development by multiple authors and has check-in and check - out, as well as version control facilities. It also provides an interface for adopting other multimedia tools such as AudioGraph. The tool has an easy-to-use graphical user interface. The technical problems that have been solved in this project include issues such as cross-platform support, drag and drop functionality using JDK l.l.8, etc. System environments, such as relational database set up, XML database set up, Java swing set up in Mac also have been discussed. The authoring system interface analysis, database analysis and function analysis have been completed for the complete the system as specified. An intermediate system, designed to a reduced specification, has been implemented as a prototype and details of this system, which can work independently of the TILE delivery system, are included. The Full TILE authoring system including InstantDB database access also has been partially implemented. The prototype application has also has been tested on the PC platform