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Teaching QuantEcon DataScience using cloud-based Jupyter notebooks

Peifan Wu

Audience level:
Intermediate

Brief Summary

In this January, Vancouver School of Economics at UBC launched the “QuantEcon DataScience” website: an open-source, innovative, interactive, cloud-based textbook for economics and data science, joint with the QuantEcon team. In this talk, Peifan Wu will share the experiences and challenges in designing and teaching this course material with a university-wide Jupyter Hub environment at UBC.

Outline

Joint with the QuantEcon team, Vancouver School of Economics at UBC launched the “QuantEcon DataScience” website (https://datascience.quantecon.org/): an open-source, innovative, interactive, cloud-based textbook for economics and data science. Utilizing a university-wide Jupyter hub (ubc.syzygy.ca) as well as Google Colab, we provide a uniform environment for the students to replicate the code executions in the lectures, and to change the code by themselves for experiments and simulations. Teaching with this course material online is slick with the interactive Jupyter environment. This spring, the first group of UBC undergrad students used this interactive textbook as part of their coursework for ECON 323 (Quantitative Economic Modeling with Data Science Applications). The teaching evaluation and feedback show a high satisfaction rate, and the students can carry out non-trivial data analysis and data visualization independently with Jupyter notebooks (check https://datascience.quantecon.org/projects.html for more details). The course content is also used by Wuhan University in the past months, and we welcome anyone interested to utilize the course material. In this talk, Peifan Wu will share the experiences and challenges in teaching the course with QuantEcon DataScience contents and exploring his perspective as an educator and that of the students. Along the way, Peifan outlines the potential of using Jupyter Hub for education in economics and data science.