Exciting collaboration launches August 2017 to educate next generation of data scientists

SAN JOSE, CA. APRIL 25, 2017 /PR NEWSWIRE/ – In a global digital economy, the role of data in making mission-critical decisions is increasing exponentially, leading to greater demand for data scientists and college graduates with a background in analytics. To address this growing worldwide demand for talent, Vocareum, a leader in cloud-based labs for coding classes, announces the launch of an online lab with the University of Notre Dame to educate the next generation of data scientists and analysts. “We value this opportunity to work with Notre Dame to leverage cloud computing to deliver the tools that our data scientists will need to succeed in the future,” says Sanjay Srivastava, the CEO of Vocareum.

Vocareum’s cloud-based environment provides instructors with a user-friendly and pedagogically effective workbench for setting up and grading problems in development environments such as R-Studio and Jupyter Notebook, and in multiple languages, including R and Python. Instructors can set up auto-graded problems to provide students with immediate feedback, manually grade student assignments, and provide in-line comments on code.

Embedded within the curriculum for Notre Dame’s new online Master of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics: Data Science Specialization, Vocareum will be used for multiple aspects of student learning and assessments including: creating practice problems, hosting homework sets, recording grades in the Learning Management System (LMS), and communicating grades and feedback to students.

By using Vocareum, Notre Dame will be able to deploy its online classes much faster and more cost effectively — until recently, the big challenge in supporting such classes has been the cost and complexity of setting up labs and compute clusters to meet the need for an up-to-date range of programming languages and analytics tools. Student work, big data sets, computation and visualization environments all present additional administrative burdens. Now with Vocareum, Notre Dame faculty and graduate students get everything in one place.

“We need learning solutions that are current, easy to use, and scalable across a large number of technical disciplines. Vocareum really fits the bill,” says Elliott Visconsi, Chief Academic Digital Officer at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Steven Buechler, Faculty Director of Notre Dame’s new online data science graduate program, adds that “we were attracted to Vocareum because it offers an extensive set of utilities built on top of AWS, giving us the flexibility to configure a cost-effective computing hub for the diverse tools we’ll be teaching across our Data Science program.”