DataLab for education
DataLab is the perfect tool to power your data science and analytics teaching, be it in academia or in companies. In this article, we describe how DataLab can support some typical education use cases.
For these use cases to work well, companies will require a DataLab Premium for Groups subscription, so they can create multiple team workspaces. Academic and DataCamp Donates groups get this DataLab Premium plan for free! Check out Pricing for more information on DataLab plans.
Use DataLab for individual and team assignments
Teachers and subject matter experts can use DataLab to build capstone projects and assignments to verify that learners can apply data skills in a real-world setting.
Configuring the assignment
Create a new workbook (example) that contains the sample notebooks that your students are required to complete.
Configure the settings for the workbooks that will be created using the link. Click on Create Copy Link. This will copy a duplication link (example) to your clipboard.
Share the link with your students (through email, your institution's LMS, your company's communication channels).
Starting the assignment
If a participant of the assignment clicks the link (example) that was sent to them:
They land into a newly created workbook, that contains all of the files of the teacher's 'source workbook', effectively cloning the 'boilerplate' workbook entirely.
They can now get started on the assignment immediately, with the explanation, data, and all packages preconfigured.
Collaborating on the assignment
When participants are supposed to collaborate on the same assignment as a team. Only one of the team's participants should click the copy link, which creates a new workbook. After that, they can click on "Share" and add the other team's participants by adding their email and ensuring they have "Editor" access.
Submitting the assignment for review
If a participant is ready for their work to be reviewed, they can share the completed workbook with the teacher again by clicking on "Share" and adding the teacher as a collaborator by adding their email. The participant can choose the rights the teacher has: viewer, commenter or editor.
As a group admin (typically the teacher), you can configure the default sharing settings of newly created workbooks inside a group. Learn more here.
Use Workspace for workshops and hackathons
Workspace is the perfect tool to organize data science and analytics workshops. You can consider them as a live variation of the assignment use case explained above:
A teacher or SME creates a boilerplate workspace and shares the copy link
Participants can create their own workspace by clicking the copy link
Participants can collaborate by inviting others as editors to the workspace
Solutions can be reviewed by others by inviting them as viewers or commenters to the workspace.
For a detailed step-by-step guide on how to organize a hackathon, check out our dedicated blog article.
If you're hosting workshops or hackathons where a lot of people will be using Workspace from the same IP address (i.e. the same physical location), Workspace may stop working because our DDOS protection can kick on. If you're planning to host a workshop or hackathon with more than 50 people in the same location, let us know at least a week up front on collabtooling@datacamp.com and we'll make sure everything goes smoothly.
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