Keep on re-imagining. Now it’s your turn!

The 31st of August 2019 the Da.Re. project will come to its end. 11 partners, 5 countries, hundreds of students, professors and professionals involved.

We collected feedbacks thanks to which we went through a period of 36 months.

What happened so far?

Starting from Italy, Portugal, the UK, Serbia and Slovenia we collaborated to identify the requirements of data science education to support Europe’s growing social and economic requirements in the public and private sectors.
Our project has researched the provision and requirement of data science education in the partners’ countries (creating what we called the Intellectual Output 1); we investigated new pathways for blended education through online and face-to-face courses (Intellectual Output 2); and finally, we developed a new approach to coordinating data science education across Europe through a curriculum that focuses on what students can contribute in the knowledge economy (Intellectual Output 3).
The results we obtained so far are different: there is patchy provision of data science education in Europe. In the UK there are many courses at European Levels 6, 7 and 8 provided by universities through conventional degree programmes and companies offering short courses of a few months for fees in the order on tens of thousands of Euros. In the other countries studied the provision of data science is much less well developed. We found a gap between the specific training created for professional data analysts and the need expressed by a wide variety of organizations to have a fast and effective way for applying data science. We developed the Da.Re. blended course of 80 hours online education to support 70 hours face-to-face education at a two-week residential school. It is a course intended for training the Data Science Bridge Specialist, someone not expert in data science but sufficiently knowledgeable to provide bridge between those focused on the commercial or social mission of an organisation, to enable the technical experts who can help them apply data science to more successfully achieve their goals.
This experience supported the development of a new curriculum for data science and recommendations on how it can be applied across Europe in the short and long terms.
We are already applying the results of our initiative to our institutions, private and public ones! In the next months you will probably be able to apply for Master’s degree in data science being able to obtain multiple degrees in different countries of the EU.
We like thinking about the possibility to expand this fruitful collaboration among the stakeholders but to do so, the turn is now yours!
All the outputs obtained with this experience are available for free download and our contacts are reported on our website just waiting for your call. Thank you and keep on re-imagining education with us!