Announce the launch of Skolar for the scikit-learn community

_posts/2025-30-06-probabl-skolar.md

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+#### Blog Post Template ####
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+#### Post Information ####
+title: "Skolar: an open-source initiative to democratize open data science"
+date: June 30, 2025
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+#### Post Category and Tags ####
+# Format in titlecase without dashes (Ex. "Open Source" instead of "open-source")
+categories:
+  - Updates
+tags:
+  - Open Source
+  - Machine Learning
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+featured-image: BSD_watermark.svg
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+#### Author Info ####
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+postauthors:
+  - name: Pénélope Gittos
+    website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gittospenelope-data-analyst-growth-bilingual/
+---
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+  <img src="/assets/images/posts_images/{{ page.featured-image }}" alt="">
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+https://skolar.probabl.ai/
+
+The scikit-learn project always puts efforts on education to build and nurture a strong vibrant open-source community. The goal is straightforward: give everyone, everywhere, the tools they need to easily grasp, engage with, and meaningfully contribute to data science using open-source software. This mission is shared and actively supported by Probabl, a company that helps maintain scikit-learn by employing many of its core contributors and investing in its long-term sustainability. With their support and a deep commitment from the community, we continue building bridges between research, software, and education.
+
+When the [Inria scikit-learn MOOC](https://inria.github.io/scikit-learn-mooc/)(Massive Open Online Course) first went live, our community got a front-row seat to the amazing impact of practical, accessible and open learning. More than 40,000 people worldwide have jumped into these courses, clearly highlighting the demand for organized, hands-on resources that blend theory with real-world practice.
+
+Today, [Probabl](https://probabl.ai/) is excited to introduce Skolar, a new, fully open-source educational initiative, built directly from your feedback and all the lessons we've learned along the way. Developed by the maintainers and core developers of scikit-learn, Skolar is designed specifically for data science practitioners, offering hands-on, high-quality learning resources grounded in real-world applications and open-source values.
+
+Skolar exists to boost our shared values: openness, teamwork, and practicality. It offers clear, interactive tutorials and structured courses carefully designed to match industry challenges and specialized use-cases. But even more importantly, it captures the true spirit of open source: encouraging collaboration, peer-to-peer learning, and guidance from experts.
+
+Right now, we’re just at the beginning. Today, you can dive into our Scikit-learn Associate Practitioner online course, adapted from the popular Inria MOOC but enhanced with new material on unsupervised learning, especially clustering.
+
+The next stages, professional and expert levels, will launch soon. We’ll also add more courses covering other open-source libraries such as skrub (for data wrangling), hazardous (for survival analysis), and fairlearn (for fairness). Additionally, our scikit-learn team is planning to create  industry-specific modules tackling real-world needs in fields like healthcare, finance, medicine, and beyond.
+
+At its core, Skolar is about empowering people through education, driven entirely by our passion for openness and collaboration. We firmly believe that true open data science begins with community-built learning resources.
+We warmly welcome you, whether you're a contributor, learner, teacher, or just someone curious, to join us. Help shape Skolar’s future and support open-source education in data science.
+
+Create your account on Skolar today: https://skolar.probabl.ai