Introduction to data science, for all, online

In this talk, we will describe the design philosophy and implementation details for an introductory data science curriculum that is designed for an audience with no statistics, computer science, or data science background. We will specifically touch on new directions in assessment, tooling, student interaction and participation as we scaled up the course from 100 to 300 students, opened it up to all undergraduate students at the University of Edinburgh, and moved it online during the pandemic. In particular, we will discuss how we made increased use of teamwork, live coding, peer evaluation, automated feedback to better serve and support this audience in a remote setting as well as challenges encountered due to students from a wide variety of backgrounds working with technologies that are new to them such as R, RStudio, Git, and GitHub without in person support.