Proposed work for 'data science curricula'

Dear all,
as discussed at the last RDA plenary in Amsterdam, Joy and I looked at
several ideas for 'data science curricula'. Joy was so kind to write a
summary (see below). We would like to use this as a starting point for a
discussion on this mailing list and, of course, at the next RDA plenary.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Cheers,
Christopher.
Purpose of the group: to define, agree and promote skills needed by researchers and research support staff. A key objective is to understand how the roles must fit together and where particular skills are shared across roles.
Proposed work:
Given the large remit of the group, it is deemed sensible to progress incrementally towards our overall goal through small bits of work. Following the next meeting of the RDA IG in San Diego, we will begin working in small groups to define skill sets for the following roles:
* Data scientists
* Data librarians
* Research administrators
* Research infrastructure managers and operators
A template will be developed to allow each group to record the skills and required ability levels for their particular stakeholder group. The IG will have the mapping ready for review by June 2015 to enable refinement and agreement prior to releasing the mapping as the IG's first deliverable for the 6th Plenary meeting scheduled for September 2015.
Suggested approach:
As a starting point, we suggest making use of the CRediT taxonomy as the common framework for describing skills needed across the different roles. The CRediT taxonomy was developed by the Wellcome Trust and Digital Science to represent the various roles and skills required to produce a range of research outputs. The classification includes many of the activities associated with authoring research publications but also includes wider research activities such as securing funding and project management. The potential value of the CRediT taxonomy for the IG on Education and Training is that it assumes that more than one role may be involved in any/all of the activities and allows users to specify a 'degree of contribution' - either 'lead', 'equal', or 'supporting'. This acknowledgement that many different roles will be involved in research activities will enable the IG to map data scientists, data librarians, research administrators and other support roles to particular areas of effort thereby ensuring that curricula development is complementary in nature. CASRAI is working with the team to gather feedback on the proposed taxonomy with the intention of developing it as open standard.
For each of the 14 taxonomy elements, the IG will list the skills that their particular stakeholder group should have in relation to the activity. We suggest using either Bloom's taxonomy to describe the cognitive domain or something more simplified version such as the such 'ability level' described in the Data Management Skills Support Initiative - Assessment, Benchmarking, Classification (DaMSSI-ABC) scheme. The Jisc funded DaMSSI-ABC project aimed to classify course offerings produced by the Jisc 01/12 RDMTrain projects to ensure that the anticipated outcomes of these and other training interventions could be clearly set out to allow participants to select the training that best meets their particular learning objectives. The DaMSSI-ABC team developed the classification scheme based on reviews of the Research Information and Data Literacies Coalition (RIDLs) criteria for describing and evaluating which had been considered alongside Vitae's Researcher Developer Framework (RDF) and the European Commission funded DigCurV curricula lenses.
As an example of mapping of librarians' skills to the CRediT taxonomy, please refer to 'Open Science - How do librarians fit in?' (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/webfm_send/1778) which was presented by Joy Davidson at the LISC 75 Conference on November 28, 2014.
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Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC)
Dr. Christopher Jung
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