DataCamp is now free for US and UK teachers and their students!

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and now the founder of Schmidt Futures, switches his camera on one June evening. He is about to speak for ten minutes at the start of an event with Data Science for Everyone, an event that has brought together industry leaders, educational institutions, policymakers, and other individuals committed to elevating the spread of data literacy.

What better way to illustrate the importance of data than to discuss how nowadays we generate more data every forty minutes than we did in the entirety of time before 2003? What better way to drive home the importance of education than to discuss how the Virginia public education system made him into what he was today? Nor does he beat about the bush, especially with regards to data literacy. “Every. Single. Job. Is going to be data-intensive.”

Our New Mission: Free DataCamp Access to Secondary Students and Teachers

Having set the scene, he goes on to introduce the event itself. There will be a lot of announcements made today, but he takes the audience through a few he wishes to highlight — one of which is DataCamp’s new mission to offer our platform for free to secondary and postsecondary teachers and students around the world.

DataCamp for Classrooms is expanding

And we’re not stopping there: DataCamp is proud to announce that DataCamp for Classrooms is available to all high schools across the US and UK with plans to expand to more countries, starting with Belgium later this year. DataCamp for Classrooms allows teachers and their students free Professional access to our platform, which includes everything in our individual Premium plan, and even more! Teachers can utilize the all-important Assignments feature, whereby they can assign any piece of content with a deadline to their students, send automated email reminders, and see who has completed the assignments (and when!). On top of Assignments, DataCamp for Classrooms also includes:

• An organization dashboard
• Teams
• Leaderboards
• Reporting
• Live chat for admins

DataCamp for Classrooms has already seen great success: beginning in late 2016 when we decided to forgo discounted subscriptions for college and university educators and instead make them completely free, DataCamp for Classrooms has seen usage in over 23,000 classrooms, reaching more than 500,000 active college and university learners to date.

For many students, this was their first-ever foray into the world of data science, given the freshness of the field. We received tons of glowing feedback from them regarding the courses’ ease of use and interactivity, in no small part thanks to the ability to practice using simulations of the software which spared the need to download anything. Thanks to this we decided to take things a step further and begin offering our content to high school teachers.

A Common Goal with Schmidt Futures

Much like Schmidt Futures and many of the event’s other attendees, DataCamp’s goal has always been to create a better-educated world, in our case one in which all people are equipped with the skills to extract insights from data and inform decision-making. Big data is revolutionizing the world, and it will soon become a quintessential part of computing classes in schools, as intrinsic as how to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the basics of preparing a document, or staying safe from online threats.

Sign Up to DataCamp for Classrooms

Signing up is completely free, so whether you would like to give us a try or are ready to get your students started in learning data science, we are looking forward to you joining! Classroom subscriptions last six months, after which time you may reapply. And if you’re reading this as a student, feel free to pass this on to your teacher so your whole class can access our content for free!

If you would like to rewatch the Commitments Event with Data Science for Everyone you can do so by clicking here and if you would like to follow them on Twitter you can do so at @dsforeveryone.