Building a Data Science Program in Higher Vocational Education
As the industry is becoming more data-driven, hiring roles with more data-related skill sets, such as data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts, is necessary. To meet this need in the industry, we have built a two-year data science program in higher vocational education together with industry experts. The program contains courses in programming, data processing, mathematics, statistics, machine learning, deep learning, data engineering, and more. Besides these theoretical courses, there are two internship courses where students apply their skills to real data science problems in different companies.
The program is also built using a modern approach to education that follows the trend in society. For example, we have created a Discord community for each cohort, alum, and industry partner. In this way, the students can share experiences and knowledge and help each other, becoming each other's learning resources. The students also use GitHub throughout their education, building portfolios to share with future employers.
Kokchun is a data scientist and teacher who strives to inspire people to pursue the beauty of programming and mathematics. He is constantly sharpening his technological and pedagogical skills to do this successfully. His pedagogical strategy is based on a combination of structure from special pedagogy and clear visualizations for storytelling. Currently, he works at IT-Högskolan, where he built the data science program with industry partners.