This 24-hour free course will teach you how to write your own computer programs, one line of code at a time. You'll learn how to access open data, clean and analyse it, and produce visualisations. You will also learn how to write up and share your analyses, privately or publicly.
This is the free text that goes with a free OpenLearn course run by the Open University, and this is probably the best such course I have ever worked through. Indeed, so good I went through it a second time.
The course is presented by Ruth Alexander of BBC Radio's excellent "More or Less" show that looks at numbers in the news and in life, with a critical and analytical eye. I very much recommend that show too, which can be downloaded as an iTunes podcast.
The course teaches how to conduct your own analysis of data, pointing to very many sources of open data on the way. It also teaches how to install and use Jupyter Notebooks, which are Python powered visual tools for carrying out data analysis with all the power of Excel, as well as the ability to dip int Python coding, making them much more powerful.
The use of Jupyter notebooks may be off putting to some. Why learn to use something else when we could use a spreadsheet? But the course answers those questions as you discover the power of using them. I use Jupyter Notebooks for a number of things, and they are just so much more flexible than Excel (although I do write them to access data I have in spreadsheets or on Google sheets).
Data analysis is a very important skill in this day and age, and both this free book and the free course are real gems in the offering from the Open University.
With various chunks of products and itemized lists,keeping up with current uses introduces the user to the world of data science,meaning accessibility,options and customized data loads.The Open University accesses these needs making easily transferable data an open access forum for changes.