Get started with data analysis in this free course developed in conjunction with the World Bank. There is a particular focus on issues and examples from the West Africa region.
Lessons
An introduction to the world of data
- Definitions and characteristics of open data
- Questions and misconceptions about open data
- What is restricted, public and open data?
- The lifecycle of data
- Open data workflow
- Evaluating data and metadata
- Introduction to types of attributes of data
- Understanding data formats
- Qualities of good data
- Open data licences and sharing
- Exploration of open-data decision making
- The benefits to media and civil society organisations
- Why you should credit data
- Recap and test
Data acquisition
- Creating reader surveys with Google Forms
- Creating data using the Open Data Toolkit
- Advance Google search
- Google Scholar: Access academic papers, patents and sources
- Google Datasets
- How to get breaking news alerts and data
- Other important data sources and reports
- Parsing PDFs and other formats
- Data scraping
- Scraping PDFs (online and offline)
- Stories in data: Sums and rates
- Stories in data: calculating averages and percentage change
Data analysis
- Introduction to Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
- Stories in numbers: Calculating percentages
- Stories in numbers: Averages and percentage change
- Stories in numbers: Sums and rates
- Testing the reliability of data
- Performing EDA
- Common analytical functions
- Analytical concepts and tools
- Using simple database functions in a spreadsheet
- An introduction to data visualisation