Ad hoc efforts for advancing data science education

With increasing demand for training in data science, extracurricular or “ad hoc” education efforts have emerged to help individuals acquire relevant skills and expertise. Although extracurricular efforts already exist for many computationally intensive disciplines, their support of data science education has significantly helped in coping with the speed of innovation in data science practice and formal curricula. While the proliferation of ad hoc efforts is an indication of their popularity, less has been documented about the needs that they are designed to meet, the limitations that they face, and practical suggestions for holding successful efforts. To holistically understand the role of different ad hoc formats for data science, we surveyed organizers of ad hoc data science education efforts to understand how organizers perceived the events to have gone—including areas of strength and areas requiring growth. We also gathered recommendations from these past events for future organizers. Our results suggest that the perceived benefits of ad hoc efforts go beyond developing technical skills and may provide continued benefit in conjunction with formal curricula, which warrants further investigation. As increasing numbers of researchers from computational fields with a history of complex data become involved with ad hoc efforts to share their skills, the lessons learned that we extract from the surveys will provide concrete suggestions for the practitioner-leaders interested in creating, improving, and sustaining future efforts.