Objective and Tasks for 2023/2024

[Gustavo-SF]

#DL: 13/08 (Postponed)

We Need Your Brainpower! 🧠

Hey Academy,

As you all know, our mission is:

... create and maintain a community of excellence, with the teaching and learning of Data Science at its core.

But, to keep up with the pace, this next year we're trying to set some new objectives and come up with cool tasks to help us achieve them. You can think of an Objective like a North Star guiding our way, and the tasks are the steps we need to take to get there. 🌟

Here's the deal:

The most important thing is that you give us three objectives you think we should pursue. These can be completely fresh ideas or something we've chased before that you reckon still holds value. Along with each objective, let us know some tasks you think would help us hit those targets. Like if you think we should "Increase student engagement in our classes", you could suggest tasks like "Start monthly live gathering" or "Create an achievement badge system". These tasks are just examples to help us understand your objective better, so don't worry too much about them.

Remember, your ideas could be about anything you think we should focus on. Whether it's the course content, getting our community more engaged, making our portal even more user-friendly – you name it.

Please send your shiny ideas our way by 06/08!

Cheers

[carlacotas]

Create a community of LDSA Alumni and Volunteers Alumni
The goal of this objective is to mantain the community, to promote the engagement, feel of community, interactions and sharing between members. For students and volunteers feel that they matters even they are not anymore students or active volunteers.
Tasks: Release new slack groups

Mantain/Increase graduation rates
The goal is at least mantain the graduation rate.
Tasks: Engage students in meaningful knowledge sharing sessions, promove work hours for discussions, and activities to increase graduation rates. Make knowledge transferrable also between students and volunteers with sharing sessions from time to time about an interesting topic.

Ensure learning experience satisfaction rate
The goal is to evaluate the satisfaction of the students during the batch, and see if anyone starts to be not motivated to bring the student again motivated.
Tasks: feedback form shared at the end of each BLU

[anaritarc]

Reduce Volunteers Workload 📚
Since it might be a cause for volunteers quitting.

Tasks: Make the material more lean (does it make sense to change everything every year? maybe it would make more sense for some materials/exercises to be equal every year and to change the hackathons and capstone), so the end to end process is faster, and we can really focus on the experience and contact with the students.

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Increase Community feeling 💛
Do we have volunteers with very few contact with the academy? does this impact the engagement and retaining of volunteers?

Tasks: 1st Understand what makes people more engaged (I believe we already have this data)

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Improve Students experience 🚀
We want to improve the students experience, with being more responsive to the questions raised on slack channels. I believe this should be our focus, I believe it will help with the engagement and increase the graduation rates.

Tasks: Understand if it's possible to do so, or if the workload will increase to much for the gains.

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Increase Volunteers commitment 🎮

Tasks: Discuss ideas to do so (for example communicate the option to be a seasonal volunteer)

[pratiksshajain]

Objective 1: Enhance Community Engagement
Immediate Tasks:

• Organize bi-weekly virtual meetups for members to network, learn, and share their knowledge.
• Launch a series of data science challenges or hackathons to engage the community in a practical, hands-on manner.
• Introduce a reward or recognition system for active participants, increasing motivation and involvement, may be organize quiz, contests, games, etc.

Objective 2: Strengthen Partnerships with Community and Academia
Immediate Tasks:

• Arrange for guest lectures, case study contributions, free webinars and sponsorship of events.

Objective 3: Improve the User Experience on our Learning Method
Immediate Tasks:

• Conduct a user experience audit and gather feedback from students on their learning experience.
• Implement user updates based on feedback to make the learning more intuitive and easy-to-navigate.
• Introduce a responsive support system (chatbots, FAQs, etc.) to resolve student queries promptly.

These proposed objectives and tasks are aimed to further our mission and contribute to our goal of creating an engaged, collaborative community of Data Science learners.

Let's pave the way to data-driven success together!

Suggestions and Corrections are welcome

[jgerebelo]

Expand learning materials
Expand on the current learning materials by adding more details. Example:

• add details on optimization methods such as gradient descent
• add new time series libraries

Define, more clearly, evaluation criteria for the Academy
A few topics, on this subject, that could be worked on could be the following:

• Define more clearly Capstone criteria, specially in terms of the level that we demand
• How to deal with situations where students may use previous years materials to find solutions. Do we care that they may copy?
• Is there any way to make Hackathons fairer in terms of distinguishing between members of each group, since they contribute differently?

Increase the Academy's presence and importance on LinkedIn
This would make both students achievements and volunteers contributions more relevant for recruiters (and potentially also help in terms of getting volunteers)

[Gustavo-SF]

It is really interesting to see all of your ideas. They can be quite different, but I believe we can converge some of them.
Let me share my ideas too!

1. Create a development path for all volunteers in the Academy

Be it in Teaching or Marketing, I would like the Academy to be an opportunity for volunteers to develop themselves. They are able to join with little experience and leave with a job, experience and a network.

Tasks:

• Restructure the organisation in order to foster volunteer evolution
• Make yearly election procedures to allow more volunteer rotation for responsibilities
• Plan development paths for different volunteers
• Organise Knowledge Sharing sessions

2. Create a Community for Data Scientists in Lisbon to organise live events focused on sharing knowledge

Task:

• Create a Slack channel for Lisbon Data Science Community
• Organise monthly meetups
• Partner with other companies / groups

3. Document all the Operational Work within the Academy

For the Academy to be self-sustaining, it is needed that any leader is able to just take up a new role and know exactly all the operational work that is required.

Task:

• Make a complete task list for organising the Batch
• Make a complete task list for organising the Prep Course

[carlacotas]

I have a suggeestion for topic 2: Create a Community for Data Scientists in Lisbon to organise live events focused on sharing knowledge

We can check with Data Science Portugal the possibility of cooperation in organizing meetups in Lisbon. DSPT has this description on meetup "By the end of 2019 we counted a total of 70 meetups organized in 5 cities (Porto, Aveiro, Braga, Coimbra and Lisbon) and almost 2200 members registered in the community."

[majkah0]

1. Achieve higher graduation rates both in the academy and the prep course.
2. Prepare academy students better for the 1st hackathon.
3. Get added value for students from senior instructors.