The Educational Data Science Graduate Certificate is designed for graduate students interested in new-often digital-data sources and analytic methods in educational contexts. While there are courses and workshops designed to enable researchers to work with digital sources of data and accompanying methods, they are not widespread. At the same time, there is growing student interest in and demand for courses that equip them to work with more complex and varied sources of data, including data from course learning management systems and social media-based professional networks for educators.
The certificate objectives include:
- Wrangling data and the tidy data format
- Introduction to data visualization
- Ethics, privacy, and justice in the context of data science
- Posing questions that can be answered using digital data sources, including data from learning management systems
- Accessing and working with structured (from databases/APIs) and unstructured (e.g., text) data
- Introduction to functional programming for preparing complex datasets
- Creating static and dynamic data visualizations using R
- Using modeling interfaces (e.g., tidymodels) for specifying a range of inferential and machine learning models
- Exploring useful and ethical applications of machine learning in education
- Estimation and inference in the context of larger datasets
Campus Code
- Distance Education
- Knoxville Campus
Graduate Certificate Type
Admissions Standards/Procedures
- Applicants can be currently admitted to a degree program at UTK or can apply solely for the Educational Data Science Certificate through the Graduate Admissions Office.
- All 12 credit hours of graduate coursework must be completed at the University of Tennessee within five years of applying for a certificate.
Academic Standards
Students must maintain a 3.5 GPA in all certificate courses in the program and complete the requirements within five years of applying for a certificate.
Credit Hours Required
12 graduate credit hours
Required Courses
A total of 4 courses and a capstone project are required for the certificate.
Students may petition on the basis of the relevance of the topic for a maximum of one other course to replace one of the four required courses.
Non-Course Requirements:
To receive the certificate, students must
1) complete the Graduate Certificate Course Verification Form (located on the Graduate School webpage under the Forms Central tab) and
2) through MyUTK, apply to graduate from the certificate program.
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