Challenges and Approaches to Teaching Data Science Technologies in an Information Technology Program with Non-Traditional Students

Teaching Data Science to traditional CS majors presents many challenges to students, faculty and the supporting infrastructure. When the student population changes from Computer Science students to those in an Information Technology program where many of the core CS courses are not required, additional challenges arise. Couple these challenges with teaching non-traditional students who are also involved with their families and careers; the difficulty in teaching this material rises exponentially. For our experiment, we chose to teach the Hadoop Distributed File System, the Map/Reduce paradigm, and basic Hadoop programming to expose these students to Data Science technologies. We will discuss our recent experience teaching Data Science to Information Technology students and the challenges we had to overcome, including missing distributed systems knowledge, a lack of basic Unix and operating systems understanding and a complete unfamiliarity with a Distributed File System.