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Computing & Digital Blog

December 6, 2019

Training in data science

I attended a Digital Skills Partnership event on data science recently, which was held at the Langside Campus of Glasgow Clyde College. The purpose of the event was to update college lecturers about developments in data science. The presentations and workshops were presented by lecturers from St Andrews and Edinburgh universities. I enjoyed the event a great deal, and learned something about Jupyter Notebooks, which look great for teaching and learning. We’re doing a lot of developments in this area.…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 5

December 4, 2019

Digital Skills Partnership’s Critical Friends Programme

The Digital Skills Partnership’s Critical Friends Programme is a free mentorship programme, funded by Scottish Funding Council and Skills Development Scotland, in which lecturers are matched with industry friends for 12 months to provide insight into current industry practice and discuss how to help ensure students have the skills they need to succeed in industry. If you are delivering HNC/D or Undergraduate level courses in the area of Computer Science you could be matched with one of the following industry…

Categories: Computing

Helen 1

November 26, 2019

First meeting of the development team for PDA Data Science

Following my recent announcement that SQA was about to begin the development of a suite of new, advanced qualifications in data science, the Qualification Development Team (QDT) met for the first time on Saturday in SQA’s offices in Glasgow. The QDT has representation from colleges, industry and national organisations but we’re looking for more members, particularly from the university and employment sectors, so please let Emma know if you’re interested in working with us. I was particularly pleased to welcome…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 1

November 22, 2019

Register now for cyber security training

All centres should have received a set of teaching and learning material for NPA Cyber Security. We now plan to provide training on the use of the material, and also demonstrate teaching approaches. I’m now able to provide more information about this training. There will be three training events. 1. Wednesday, 5 February at Stirling Management Centre. 2. Friday, 21 February at Radisson Blu Hotel in Glasgow. 3. Friday, 28 February at Radisson Blu Hotel in Edinburgh. The first event…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 9

November 15, 2019

Extra support for NPA Data Science

The Short Life Working Group (SLWG), which I previously mentioned, met today to discuss how best to support the new NPA in Data Science. We looked at ways of providing additional support to teachers because of the unique challenges that data science presents to practitioners. The recently produced materials for NPA Cyber Security have been very well received by teachers and, ideally, we’d like to do something similar for this qualification. But that material was funded by central government, as…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 1