Like last year, it is a diverse group of students from all across the world (a.o. Norway, Russia, South-Korea, China, Bangladesh, Iran, Zambia, India, Pakistan, Australia, and Peru) and with various study backgrounds (a.o., psychology, education, economics, engineering), and work & life experience. All ready for a guided journey through a new interdisciplinary field to upgrade their research competence and quantitative data-analysis skills!
We started off with an information meeting on Thursday 15/08 clarifying practical organizational details and providing some further insight in what to expect in the programme. A traditional individual introduction round could of course not be missing either. We also sketched out some current practices in the field of Assessment, Measurement, & Evaluation that are far from being evidence-based, but still somehow surviving.
After this more serious business, there was time to mingle and grab a coffee before our new cohort joined our second-year students for a boat trip to the islands in the Oslo fjord. Now, after a full week of learning to use the open-source statistical software environment R in the data science course, students are already able to program their own functions and are currently practicing their data wrangling skills! Next up in the coming weeks are learning how to describe, visualize, analyze, and make inferences from data. We will keep you posted!