Data Science Education in iSchools across the Asian-Pacific Region

Abstract

In this poster, we report preliminary findings of our investigation of data science education in iSchools around the world. For our analysis, we randomly sampled 20 iSchools within the regions of Asian-Pacific, European, and North American. We report here the findings from the 20 iSchools in the Asian Pacific region: these iSchools come from 9 different countries/areas, including China (n=9), Korea (n=3), New Zealand (n=2), Australia (n=1), Malaysia (n=1), Thailand (n=1), Indonesia (n=1), Philippines (n=1), and Taiwan, China (n=1). Of 20 iSchools, 15 had DS course information, with an average of 8.13 per program, range 1-21, and mode 4. The majority of the programs offered DS courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels (n=11, 73.33%), three (20.00%) offered at the graduate level only, one (6.67%) only offered at the undergraduate level.

In terms of the course coverage, there were 30 unique topics, with 15 topics included in multiple iSchools’ curriculum, and the remaining 15 were uniquely offered by one iSchool. The most common course topics were Data Structure or Data Organization (n=10, 66.67%), Data Mining & Data Warehouse (n=9, 60.00%), Data Visualization (n=6, 40.00%), Introduction to Data Science (n=6, 40.00%), Machine Learning (n=6, 40.00%), and NLP Text Analysis/Text Mining (n=5, 33.33%). Other repeated topics include Research Data Management, Big Data, AI, Programming, Data governance, Data Analytics, and more. Examples for unique course topics were blockchain, Data Asset Management, Data Security, UX, and more. Further coding and analysis for all three regions are in progress.