RIT Professor Rajendra Raj and Associate Professor Xumin Liu have received a National Science Foundation award to develop a hands-on data science course for non-computing majors.
What’s interesting about this article is that a web-based, FOSS Data Science Learning Platform will be created to support the course. This’ll let students use data science tools, analyze data, and learn about the computational aspects of data science without requiring coding knowledge.
This is really interesting. I’m curious to learn more about what they are going to teach. Big data and interpreting trends is a big thing to be able to do regardless of your major. Right now if you are outside of CS, most data analysis comes from the form of doing it in either excel or something like Tableau. Not to say these tools are not as powerful, but there is a limit to what you can do if you are not a programmer. There is even a growing trend for non-programmers in the data-heavy fields like finance and medical to do some basic scripting in something like Python.
Looks like the result is ISCH-370 - Analyzing Digital Data