The European Data Science Academy: Bridging the data science skills gap with Open Courseware

As a global society, we are producing data at an incredible rate, fuelled by the increasing ubiquity of the Web, and stoked by social media, sensors, and mobile devices. However, as the amount of produced data continues to increase, so does the demand for practitioners who have the necessary skills to manage and manipulate this data. The European Data Science Academy (EDSA) is looking to bridge the data science skills gap by developing multimodal open courseware tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. The EDSA courseware is implemented as a combination of living learning materials and activities (eBook, online courses, webinars, face-to-face training), produced via a rigorous process and validated by the data science community through continuous feedback.