Over the last five years there has been an explosion in the number of educational courses provided online. This is no surprise when you consider the potential benefits to the learner. You can learn what you want. You can learn at home. You can learn at your own pace. Online courses have the potential to open up new exciting career opportunities to anyone who has access to the internet.
Scotland needs more people with the skills to manipulate, organise and analyse an ever increasing amount and variety of data. This demand is not confined to traditional computing industries. Data skills are required in agriculture, tourism, construction, energy and most industry sectors.
To achieve The Data Lab’s vision to showcase Scotland as an international leader in Data Science, and to train a new generation of data scientists, they are looking to fund the development of online courses which contribute to the requirement for more flexible high-quality data science training and education. These may take the form of MOOCs or closed application online courses.
The Data Lab will provide between £30,000 and £50,000 for the development of up to three online courses for this call. These must be delivered fully online, which means there should be no mandatory in-person requirement for the learner. You can select one of the following three course types:
MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) – Typically delivered for free using a pre-existing popular MOOC platform (up to £30k)
Online Training – Paid for learning content that is focused on equipping Scottish Industry with the data science training they need (up to £30k)
MOOC and Online Training – A combination of 1 and 2. This could be a MOOC with additional paid-for advanced learning content that meets the data science training needs of Scottish Industry. Here is an example. (Up to £50k)
If you are interested, please complete and submit the online Expression of Interest form at The Data Lab web site. You must submit your completed application form by 17:00 on Monday 13th February 2017.
Before submitting your Expression of Interest please read our application guidance.
Further online guidance on how to build a MOOC can be found online thourgh many different sources. Here are some examples that might be useful from The University of Glasgow, The University of Edinburgh and Nature.com.
This article is based on a piece at The Data Lab web site here
