Designing a Data Science Program

During 2014-2016 I was involved in the design and proposal for a brand new undergraduate program at Valparaiso University, a degree in Data Science. This process involved significant background research into the current state of the field, other educational initiative and programs that had been started recently at other universities, etc.

In the attachments to this page I've included PDF's (and the occasional PPT) of most of the documents I used to craft my program and proposals.

I'll highlight a few key ones here though:

  1. The College of Charleston has had a long-standing program along the lines of Data Science, which was rebranded a few years ago. The director of that program had a paper published in SIGCSE 2014. I highly recommend reading that as a partial starting point. A good portion of Valpo's program is modelled after this program.
  2. In October of 2015, a large group of Computer Scientists, Statisticians, and other disciplines from several professional societies (ACM, ASA, IEEE-CS, AMS, more) participated in a workshop to examine the need for curricular guidance. They produced a nice workshop report available at: http://www.computingportal.org/DataScienceMeeting
  3. More Recently, a group of primarily Statisticians and Mathematicians (apparently a disjoint set from the October 2015 group) actually produced some curricular guidelines (I don't agree entirely with them...but you should probably still read them). https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~nolan/Papers/Data.Science.Guidelines.16.9.25.pdf (note, this isn't in the file list)

You can take a direct look at Valpo's program here: http://www.valpo.edu/mathematics-statistics/academics/degree-programs/b-s-in-data-science/

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Right now this page is largely a brain/file dump from what I've collected, but I'm happy to answer specific questions about my thoughts and processes. I hope to post more thoughts on this matter eventually...