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The nascent School of Data is recruiting its first data wrangler, whose role will include building content for learning challenges and courses.

One the wrangler’s first tasks will be to help create a series of learning challenges for a Data Wrangling 101 course – including finding, retrieving, cleaning, manipulation, analysis and representation of different types of data.

The school – a joint venture between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) announced in February – aims to provide flexible, on-demand, shorter learning options for people who are actively working in areas that benefit from data skills. It says there is a particular need amongst people who have already left formal education.

The school will adopt the successful peer-to-peer learning model established by P2PU and Mozilla in their ‘School of Webcraft’ partnership. Learners will progress by taking on ‘learning challenges’ – a series of structured, achievable tasks, designed to promote collaborative and project-based learning.

As learners progress, their achievements will be assessed and recognised with badges. Community support and on-demand mentoring will also be available for those who need it.

With funding secured from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the Shuttleworth Foundation, the school’s next challenges are:

• To promote Data Wrangling 101 to potential participants.
• To recruit community leaders to act as ‘mentors’, providing community support and on-demand mentoring for those who need it.
• To curate, update and extend the existing manuals and reference materials such as the Open Data Handbook and the Data Patterns Handbook.
• To design and implement assessments which evaluate achievements and establish credentials for the relevant skills and competencies.
• To openly license all education content (challenges, manuals, references and materials) so that anyone can use, modify and re-use it, including instructors and learners in formal education.

The school is also seeking volunteers to help design educational materials, mentor and donate funds.