Chapter 2 Program Philosophy
Our philosophy with building this course and this program is to try to make data science accessible to the widest audience possible.
This course is part of the DataTrail series of courses.
These courses are designed to tackle some of the challenges that prevent people from getting into data science in the first place. Some of those challenges are geographic - we’ll talk more about that later. Some are due to the price of education - that is why we are offering these courses as MOOCs. But one of the key barriers is that the type of computer you usually need to do data science is expensive.
Chromebooks, on the other hand, are a very cheap type of computer. Chromebooks aren’t exactly like normal computers and they have a few unique characteristics:
- They are usually very cheap
- They are designed mostly to use the web
- You don’t “install” any software on the computer itself
- Instead of “apps” and “software” you simply go to websites for your work
A simple way to think about it is that a Chromebook is a computer that only lets you use an internet browser like Chrome. You can’t really do much on the computer itself. Some people call this way of working - working only through the internet - “cloud computing”.
It’s called cloud computing because the computer you are using most of the time is not the one sitting in front of you. You are using the internet to access tools and computers to do your work. But the physical computers doing the work are stored somewhere else - it could be nearby or on the other side of the globe. That is why people call the computers “in the cloud”.
The goal of DataTrail is not that you have to use a Chromebook to finish the program, it is just that you could use a Chromebook to finish the whole program. You can finish the entire sequence of courses using any computer with an internet connection and a web browser.
We took this approach because we want data science to be accessible to everyone. We have found that in earlier classes we taught online, the cost of computers, difficulties installing software, and lack of computing resources prevented students from completing our courses. We wanted to strip all those barriers away so that more students would have access to our program.
We also believe that the future of data science is increasingly cloud based. So this educational choice matches a trend we see in the field that we can help you take advantage of. It is less and less likely that you will work only on your laptop as a data scientist. Through the internet you will access data and computing power so that you can magnify the impact of what you are working on. We hope to show you how to use those resources to maximize the value you can bring as a new data scientist.
We do recognize that internet access is also a limiting factor for many people. We have tried to make it so that you don’t have to download data so hopefully the broadband requirements will be minimal. We hope that if internet access is a challenge for you that you can leverage the resources you have - whether they are local libraries, coffee shops, or internet cafes to complete this program. If that isn’t an option for you we’d love to hear from you and see if we can find ways to make data science accessible to everyone, everywhere.