#Certificate Design

The Data Analytics Certificate for Early Career launched this autumn quarter. This program is designed to help students with STEM degrees, business degrees or other equivalent experience transition to a job in data analytics. I worked with Carey Schroyer (Dean of STEM), Vernon Hawkins (Dean of Business), Kristi Lagrutta (Director of Workforce Development and Training) and Gargi Chakraborty (Director of Data Science at Starbucks). Gargi and I worked together to write the initial program learning objectives and then learning objectives for each course in the program. The whole team worked together to refine then and once they were complete, I input them into Curriculog.

Our team's original goal waws to develop a certificate with 19 credits or less of classes to train people who already had at least an associate's degree to do data analytics work. However, we found early on that we could not combine all of our goals into one certificate. Instead, we needed two as there were two different populations we were aiming to serve.

The first is students who are wishing to change careers and have no data analytics experience. The other is people who have been working as a data analyst already but who realize they need to up their skills to progress their career. These students already know the basics, what they need is more depth. This is why we ended up with two separate certificates.

#Course Design

In order to create useful certificates we had to create a whole set of new courses. While some of them overlap topic-wise with other courses already taught at Edmonds they have a very different emphasis. This allows us to tailor the curriculum to the subjects most needed which allows us to fit in more classes before hitting 19 credits. For example, Edmonds first programming class puts a lot of emphasis on graphical user interfaces. These are not at all important for data analysis. Instead, they need to learn how to read and write files, how to go through them to clean data and do other data manipulation tasks. Having new classes helps us accomplish this.

As part of this certificate design, I designed curriculum for and taught the first two certificate courses, Introduction to Statistics and Introduction to Data Processing. This was a stretch for me. I had never taught a class of returning students or a class that covers computational math or how to use a program that someone else has written (Excel and GoogleSheets in this case). It was a good learning experience.

#Future Goals

We have already completed the list of classes, their outcomes, the program and its learning outcomes. We plan to add the advanced certificate to Curriculog this year and get the program and courses approved by the curriculum committee. We hope to be able to offer the advanced certificate autumn quarter 2023.