Development of Education Curriculum in the Data Science Area for a Liberal Arts University

EasyChair Preprint 8713

Abstract

Data science has emerged as a field that will revolutionize science and industry. The development of human resources for data science has become an urgent issue in every aspect of the digitizing society. However, a curriculum to meet the needs in such a digitizing society is not available to higher education in Japan, especially in the realm of liberal arts. Such liberal arts students do not have enough basic math education such as statistics before entering the university.

In response to the required situation of the approved program for Mathematics, Data Science, and AI Smart Higher education, we proposed a conceptual curriculum model for the data science education program, which systematically incorporates the knowledge module of data science while remedying the weakness in the basic math skills and barriers to be considered in the process of learning data science concepts.

The goal of this paper is to propose an integrated curriculum based on the conceptual model for the faculty members in a small-sized private liberal arts university, where students lack basic math skills, IT skills, and the basic knowledge of data science. Issues consist of the curriculum on knowledge area and subjects, the implementation approach of data science education courses, and the fusion of data science with expertise education are discussed. A sample course will be showcased at the end.

Keyphrases: Conceptual Curriculum Model, Liberal Arts University, Stage-wised Refinement Model, curriculum development, data science education

@booklet{EasyChair:8713,
  author    = {Zhihua Zhang and Toshiyuki Yamamoto and Koji Nakajima},
  title     = {Development of Education Curriculum in the Data Science Area for a Liberal Arts University},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8713},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}