VisGuided: A Community-driven Approach for Education in Visualization

Abstract

We propose a novel educational approach for teaching visualization, using a community-driven and participatory methodology that extends the traditional course boundaries from the classroom to the broader visualization community.We use a visualization community project, VisGuides, as the main platform to support our educational approach. We evaluate our new methodology by means of three use cases from two different universities. Our contributions include the proposed methodology, the discussion on the outcome of the use cases, the benefits and limitations of our current approach, and a reflection on the open problems and noteworthy gaps to improve the current pedagogical techniques to teach visualization and promote critical thinking. Our findings show extensive benefits from the use of our approach in terms of the number of transferable skills to students, educational resources for educators, and additional feedback for research opportunities to the visualization community.