Engaging everyone with open data science

Abstract

Teaching of statistics should focus more on practical data science, with a special emphasis on data wrangling: Preparing the data for the analyses, looking at the data via clever visualizations, and learning the principles and practices of open science and reproducible research. The statistics curriculum should be updated and the term “data science” used as a synonym to statistics. In all possible fields, there is a huge need to have more data scientists. To engage everyone with “open data science” (open data, open science, and data science), we have created a new course, where students from all levels and fields work together and share their ideas with openly available data sets and freely available state-of-the-art software tools, such as RStudio, R Markdown, and GitHub. The new course has been quite successful in engaging extremely heterogeneous groups of students to challenge themselves to a “next level” by learning new skills of open data science.