Teaching for-credit data courses: RDM practitioner perspectives

Data literacy is a critical skill and librarians are well positioned to teach it. Despite this, credit-based university courses are rarely taught by librarians. Part of this is practical: librarians are often full-time practitioners and academic instruction isn’t in their job descriptions. But teaching a credit course provides distinct advantages over more common one-shot instruction: Instructors have the flexibility to create cohesive whole curriculums; to delve deeply into data topics, to upskill and reignite interest in data topics, to connect with researchers and students in new ways and new contexts, to explore a world of freely available open access learning materials shared by the international RDM community. This session relates the experiences of librarians teaching credit bearing data literacy courses at two Canadian universities. They will discuss how they mapped data literacies to the course, choice of platforms, and how their professional practice has information their teaching and vice versa.

All instructors used open source, community developed resources and drew from their real-life experience to create engaging learning experiences to help their students learn and get excited about data! In this panel, we will also share some lessons learned and our future plans to chart a new course for the next generation of data professionals.