Our curriculum teaches skills at the intersection of environmental science and data science, combined with a knowledge of heterogeneous data types, open science approaches, and a suite of “soft” skills needed to communicate and collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. These in-demand skills prepare students and professionals for careers in data intensive science that address a variety of large scale environmental challenges.

In alignment with our mission to support open, reproducible science, Earth Lab has developed a number of open source software tools and packages to allow users to help teachers and students use earth data in the classroom. These include abc-classroom, EarthPy, MatPlotCheck, and nbgrader as well as customized JupyterHub and Anaconda/Python environments.

Education should be open and available to anyone. The earthdatascience.org learning portal has over 300 free and open lessons that allow anyone to learn and teach earth data science skills and has tens of thousands of visitors each month.

Our innovative classrooms include an interdisciplinary mix of undergraduate, graduate, and returning professional students who participate in active, collaborative synchronous and asynchronous learning through options for in-person or online courses. This variety in available participation modes supports students by addressing geographic and time constraints that might otherwise limit their access to formal education in earth data science.