Redesigning an Intensive, Interactive Data Science Training for Remote Participation

Abstract:

The Arctic Data Center has consistently delivered high quality, data intensive short courses for the Arctic Research Community. These one-week courses support the community in developing skills necessary for conducting research in an open and reproducible manner. A combination of instruction, demonstration, live-coding, practice, and peer mentorship results in a highly engaging experience that enables participants to cover a large amount of content in short duration. Additionally, participants have the opportunity to network and form collaborations with aligned researchers.

With changes to travel, capacity limits, and policies surrounding indoor events following COVID-19, it was necessary to transition to a remote format. While many conferences and discussion based workshops had successfully transitioned to an online environment, there were limited examples of online courses that provided the small group, code-based instruction and problem solving that our training seeks to deliver. In this presentation, we discuss the process used in course development, changes that were required, and report on the challenges and successes of the activity from instructor and participant perspectives.