Teaching Approach

This course was designed from the ground up as an online course, with optional in-person labs. The initial impetus for this was the COVID-19 pandemic, and associated lockdown. The need for the course was evident prior to the pandemic, but the need for online courses to fulfill a laboratory component in our curriculum proved to be the tipping point for me to start actually creating the course. A course in data science naturally lends itself to online teaching, because all of the tools rely on equipment that students almost universally already have at home: a computer. Recognizing that not everyone has a particularly powerful computer, however, this class allows you to rely on cloud computing resources — so the particular specifications of your computer shouldn’t matter much, as long as you have decent internet access.