Interim Report - DATALIT - Data Literacy at the interface of higher education and business

Data literacy is a term broadly used to define the ability to read, work with, analyse, visualise, and argue with data, in order to derive meaningful information and new knowledge. It is increasingly considered to be a life skill in the 21st century, employees with data literacy skills have become highly valuable in today's economy and labour market more than ever before. Regardless of the sector, data literacy skills are more and more often requested to new employees. We are currently living in a data driven society in which data are used in a multitude of domains, therefore data literacy is today an essential skill for a very wide range of professionals such as journalists, policy makers, healthcare consultants, and so on. Higher Education sector has to be prepared to provide students with these essential skills, not only in the technical departments but also in other departments more related to humanities. Moreover, data literacy plays the role of enabler for what it concerns civic engagement. In fact, data literate citizens contribute to keep governments transparent and accountable, tackle local issues, and navigate their own data ecosystems. From this premise, the project DATALIT aims to achieve the following main objectives: o offering to university students across different faculties, the opportunity to reach a suitable level of data knowledge that they can use and apply appropriately and diversely throughout their personal and professional lives. o narrowing the gap between business and academia and putting EU enterprises in direct contact with potential future employees or business partners properly trained to exploit data effectively. To meet this challenge, DATALIT will develop and pilot an innovative approach based on a long-term partnership of academia, business and educational partners. Focusing on the results achieved in the reporting period, in the initial phase of the project, partners have conducted an in-depth research aimed at identifying best practices and experiences of data literacy inclusion in EU higher education. In this phase partners have also identified needs and expectations of the target groups (students, HE professionals, employers). This initial phase has informed the definition of a syllabus including competences on data literacy. Moreover, the consortium is developing a digital learning environment to integrate the class-based courses and a sound validation and certification system, based on LEVEL5 methodology, connected to the EQF, ECTS and EUROPASS systems. The outputs developed will be piloted by the Universities involved and by students that will have the opportunity to apply their data skills through internship experiences in EU enterprises. The competences acquired by the students will be validated and connected to European validation and certification instruments.