An Investigation on Educating Data Scientists with Practical Skills through Problem-Based Learning Under the Online-Offline Hybrid Emvironment

Lessons Learned from PBL for the First and Second Year University Students

Abstract

Although many faculties give "Statistics" and "Computer Science" centered course for educating data scientists, it is necessary to foster not only technical skills of programming and statistics, but also problem-identifying and problem-solving abilities. Since 2019, the authors' faculty, Social Information Science department, University of Hyogo, in cooperation with Supermarket KOHYO (a supermarket chain in Kinki district), and Macromill, Inc. (a marketing research company) carried out half year program of a PBL (Problem-Based learning) for all of the first grade students (101 in total). The program treated real survey data of approximately 30000 consumers collected by the Macromill, and the students tried to make proposals for solving each problem of the seven real supermarkets belonging to the KOHYO chain. According to the questionnaires after the PBL, major of the students noticed what skills are necessary for them to be professional data scientists. Especially in 2020, under the spreading of COVID-19, the PBL was carried out by mixing on-line and off-line teaching. The authors found some changes of the students' minds and issues for managing practical PBL in large scale.