Designing Data Science Education at UiB

On 1 April 2022, the Statistics & Data Science group and the Center for Data Science (CEDAS) held a cross-faculty workshop on Cooperation Opportunities and Challenges in Data Science Education. The main aim of the workshop was to enhance the interaction between the departments and faculties involved in CEDAS, and start a discussion about how to improve UiB’s educational offer in data science.

“I am very glad we now have a joint cooperation meeting here at our Center for Data Science (CEDAS) at UiB, to further improve our educational offer to data science. On 1 April, we had an interesting workshop at Scandic Ørnen Hotel, considering opportunities in statistics, mathematics, informatics and information science. This will help with our mission to increase competence in data science at UiB.” (Helwig Hauser, center leader for CEDAS)

The workshop started with a plenary session containing several short presentations by researchers and educators from the Department of Informatics, the Department of Mathematics, and the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. Included in this session were also two keynote talks about Education and research within data science at the University of Oslo (Ingrid Glad, Department of Mathematics & dScience, University of Oslo) and  Computational Biology and Bioinformatics: Challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary teaching and learning (Susanna Röblitz, Department of Informatics & Computational Biology Unit, University of Bergen; NORBIS). Following this, the participants joined two different discussion groups – one on Knowledge sharing around courses taught in data science, and one on Knowledge sharing around study programs in Data Science. The discussions evolved mainly around how one could possibly combine existing courses targeting (various) data science (topics), offer more joint courses, and how to establish a new study program in data science at masters level to educate modern data scientists.