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Short-format Workshops Build Skills and Confidence for Researchers to Work with Data

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Conference

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah

Publication Date

June 23, 2018

Start Date

June 23, 2018

End Date

July 27, 2018

Conference Session

Topics in Computing and Information Technology-I

Tagged Division

Computing and Information Technology

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

20

DOI

10.18260/1-2--30960

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/30960

Download Count

745

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Paper Authors

biography

Kari L. Jordan Ph.D. The Carpentries Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8406-628X

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Dr. Kari L. Jordan is the Director of Assessment and Community Equity for The Carpentries, a non-profit that develops and teaches core data science skills for researchers.

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Marianne Corvellec Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-1994-3581

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Marianne Corvellec has worked in industry as a data scientist and a software developer since 2013. Since then, she has also been involved with the Carpentries, pursuing interests in community outreach, education, and assessment. She holds a PhD in statistical physics from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France (2012).

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Elizabeth D. Wickes University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Elizabeth Wickes is a Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, where she teaches foundational programming and information technology courses. She was previously a Data Curation Specialist for the Research Data Service at the University Library of the University of Illinois, and the Curation Manager for Wolfram|Alpha. She currently co-organizes the Champaign-Urbana Python user group, has been a Carpentries instructor since 2015 and trainer since 2017, and elected member of The Carpentries’ Executive Council for 2018.

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Naupaka B. Zimmerman University of San Francisco Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-2168-6390

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Jonah M. Duckles Software Carpentry

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Jonah Duckles works to accelerate data-driven inquiry by catalyzing digital skills and building organizational capacity. As a part of the leadership team, he helped to grow Software and Data Carpentry into a financially sustainable non-profit with a robust organization membership in 10 countries. In his career he has helped to address challenging research problems in long-term technology strategy, GIS & remote sensing data analysis, modeling global agricultural production systems and global digital research skills development.

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Tracy K. Teal The Carpentries

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Abstract

Training for data skills is more critical now than ever before. For many researchers in industry and academic environments, a lack of training in data management, munging, analysis and visualization could lead to a lack of funding to support sustainable projects. Today’s researchers are often learning ‘as they go’ and need the flexibility of short, or self-paced learning experiences. Research results in educational pedagogy, however, stress the importance of guided instruction and learner-instructor interaction, which contrasts the need for ‘just in time’ training.

We’ve taken a distinctive approach to this problem, combining the power of guided instruction with the flexibility of short, focused learning experiences. Two-day, interactive, hands-on coding workshops train researchers to work with data, and have reached over 34,000 researchers, ranging from biologists to physicists to engineers and economists. Researchers have benefited from evidence-based teaching approaches to learning data organization (spreadsheets), cleaning (OpenRefine), management (SQL), analysis and visualization (R and Python).

This paper presents the long-term survey results showing the impact that short-format workshops have for increasing learner's skills and confidence in their coding abilities. Results show these two-day coding workshops increase researchers’ daily programming usage, and sixty-five percent of respondents have gained confidence in working with data and open source tools as a result of completing the workshop. The long-term assessment data showed a decline in the percentage of respondents that 'have not been using these tools' (-11.1%), and an increase in the percentage of those who now use the tools on a daily basis (+14.5%).

Jordan, K. L., & Corvellec, M., & Wickes, E. D., & Zimmerman, N. B., & Duckles, J. M., & Teal, T. K. (2018, June), Short-format Workshops Build Skills and Confidence for Researchers to Work with Data Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30960

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