Speaker
Description
The first Summer School took place in Pretoria during January 2020. The talk will report on our experience and also share the process going forward.
Postgraduates across Africa do not have access to foundational data science and open research training that will allow them to become part of a growing community of researchers, if not fully skilled, at least understanding the rules of entering the arena of modern, open science. Such training material is available but the curriculum has not yet been decentralised and localised for Africa because it is not clearly understood where to place the hubs of knowledge from where the training could be disseminated. There is general consensus that introductory level data science training is essential for all research disciplines – to the extent that some of us see it as an element of the digital literacies. South Africa did not, at the time of us adopting the curriculum, see any institution taking on a mandate to provide such training. From our RDM implementation experience we also knew that it would be a while before generic training, that would put any post-graduate on a reliable path to understanding the data science ecosystem, would be developed in South Africa. We understood that to gain a holistic view of what is needed as foundation training, requires a number of stakeholders to collaborate. The challenge was that there were too many issues to address simultaneously if we wanted to start from scratch. The curriculum of the CODATA-RDA Data Summer School was identified as suitable for our context. The most important benefit of using the standardised curriculum is that we were able to leapfrog from an existing, tried and proven initiative – which saved us considerable time. In addition, the knowledge that the training is also being rolled out to an international community gave us the assurance that we were on the right track. The alumni network linked to the initiative is another very important benefit. Our candidates were immediately pulled into a professional network that would, under different circumstances take many years to develop. Similarly, the exposure to peers from different disciplines has created shared jargon and experience that we firmly believe will show impact in future.
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