The National Data Strategy establishes how we will ensure that the United Kingdom can take advantage of data to feed innovation and growth, and create jobs throughout the country to boost the economy. The strategy He acknowledges that it is important that everyone who abandons our schools and universities is better prepared for data -based lives and careers.
Working together
The higher education sector has a vital role to play to achieve this goal. Our strategy commissioned the sector to explore ways to teach a variety of basic and technical data skills, including project management, governance and problem solving. To improve the teaching and learning of data skills, the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) provided more than 300,000 in funds. The financing, through the Office for Students, allowed seven universities Tor try the teaching methods in the existing provision of Fundamental data skills to university students whose topic does not contain significant elements of data science.
A promising beginning
The seven pilot projects received funds from October 2021 to March 2022 and concluded the delivery of their activity financed in May 2022. The Center for Research and Career Advisor (CRAC) carried out an evaluation of the pilots and a review of evidence to identify how education suppliers inside and beyond the United Kingdom teach data from the United Kingdom.
He EVALUATION REPORT De Crac was published on August 4, along with a Press release Of the Office for Students.
The report shows that there is a variety of approaches that can be tasks to teach data skills. This includes supporting students to learn data from integrated content, which combines data skills with other central parts of a course, to conduct self -learning data courses provided by third parties.
Demonstrating the relevance of the data
The findings provide a lot of food for thought for academics and the private sector. The emerging evidence of the pilots suggests that the approaches to learning data skills that are integrated into the main curriculum of a student and taught by the main team of the subject, work better for university students. The pilots also found that several students did not know the value of data skills within their own potential professional career. This suggests that there is a margin for more work to demonstrate the relevance of these skills for future careers.
Bridging the Gap
There was evidence of a gap between the data skills that employers are looking for and what students are taught fundamentally. The participants also fought to involve a large number of students in the investigation within the pilot’s time scale, which limits the possible investigations. This leaves a lot to build, such as the higher education sector that performs an additional strategic consultation with the industry to establish the types of data skills that employers are looking for. Higher education providers could also explore the scope to carry out a long -term evaluation of different approaches to teaching data skills.
Higher education providers already show the desire to make more to improve the teaching of data skills. All projects plan to expand the learning obtained from the pilot program. Some intend to create new courses, ranging from level 4 to the doctoral level and others are intended to embed the data skills in the subjects they offer. All projects have plans to share their findings further through the conferences and through publications in pairs reviewed.
Next steps
There is a lot of knowledge and knowledge of the evaluation report that can improve the provisional of fundamental data skills. This in turn can contribute to our goal of ensuring that people throughout the United Kingdom have the Skills that need for a data -based economy and data rich in data. We would urge Colleagues throughout the sector of higher education and other interested parties to consider the findings of the thesis pilots and interact with the participants to learn from their experiences.
contact information
Send an email to the office for students if you have any questions about pilots at pgconversion@ofptpho -frostudens.org.uk.
And send an email to the team in DCMS to NationalDatrategy@dcms.gov.uk, If you have broader questions about the work associated with the implementation of the National Data Strategy.
