Thanks - skepticism is a healthy impulse! Regarding your concern about quality, part of the intention of the course is to determine whether students can indeed create solutions of enough merit to have an impact. We believe they can, but the results either way will help us investigate the efficacy of such co-creative, collaborative networks over the internet. Along those lines, this resource* *is *not* intended to replace the work of paid research assistants. Instead, it should be seen as an opportunity to expand capacity by having students from around the world take on projects that might otherwise remain unfulfilled. Please feel free to email me directly with any additional questions, or visit http://coursolve.org/courses/datascience for more details. On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Sky Croeser <scroeser@gmail.com> wrote:
I am a little skeptical about this. While I think it has the potential to be very useful, outsourcing data analysis (a key aspect of research, presumably), seems potentially problematic both in terms of the quality of research and in terms of the academic labour market (why hire a skilled research assistant when you can get students to do it for free)?
I'm curious - are these issues being addressed within the project at all?
On 15 May 2013 03:29, Amit Jain <amit@coursolve.org> wrote:
*An education researcher at Oxford is organizing an opportunity for researchers and nonprofits to receive free data analytics support from students in a massively open online course. Anyone can join the course and post real-world projects for tens of thousands of students to attempt to solve. Please read below and forward widely!*
//
*Calling all professors, researchers, and nonprofits* -- harness student learning to get free data analyses from the University of Washington's Introduction to Data Science <http://coursolve.org/courses/datascience/> course! Sign up now to recruit from tens of thousands of students to take on your organization's projects in data visualization, analysis, or predictive modeling. You may not need an internal store of data to benefit -- your organization can learn volumes through publicly available datasets.
For details and project ideas, please visit: http://coursolve.org/courses/datascience/
Questions? Contact amit@coursolve.org.
-- Amit Jain Coursolve (http://coursolve.org) Twitter: @coursolve <http://twitter.com/coursolve> | Facebook: Coursolve<http://www.facebook.com/coursolve> amit@coursolve.org | +1 617-752-2673 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- Amit Jain Coursolve (http://coursolve.org) Twitter: @coursolve <http://twitter.com/coursolve> | Facebook: Coursolve<http://www.facebook.com/coursolve> amit@coursolve.org | +1 617-752-2673