Identifying data-focused curriculum in worldwide iSchools: Preliminary data acquisition for Asia-Pacific and European members

This paper reports the data cleansing and labeling procedures for identifying 215 data-focused courses from 1,627 courses offered in 22 iSchool members as of 2019. This preliminary data acquisition is to serve as a starting point for further conducting regular, greater-scaled data acquisition in data-focused curriculum across all the iSchools in the near future. The challenges we encountered preliminary data collection include course catalog unavailability, disambiguation, and lack of data for investigating the evolution of courses. Next steps of this study are to expand our data collection to all the iSchool members and create an interactive data dashboard with periodically automatic data acquisition over time. We anticipate such public datasets and interactive visualizations are beneficial for iSchool educators and researchers who are interested in the development of data-focused curricula, as well as potential students. 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology October 25-29, 2020. Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license.