The Open University (OU) is offering a free online course on Learn to Code for Data Analysis. The course does not assume prior experience in programming or data analysis. Basic familiarity with a spreadsheet application will be an advantage.

Learn programming, to analyse and visualise open data, with this free online course.

Course At Glance

Length: 4 weeks
Effort: 5 hours/week
Subject: Data Analysis
Institution: Open University (OU) and Future learn
Languages: English
Price: Free
Certificate Available: Yes
Session: Closed

Providers’ Details

The Open University (OU) is the largest academic institution in the UK and a world leader in flexible distance learning, with a mission is to be open to people, places, methods and ideas.

About This Course

This hands-on 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 it and analyse it and to produce visualisations. You will also learn how to write up and share your analyses, privately or publicly.

You will install free software to learn to code in Python, a widely-used programming language across all disciplines, due to its support for scientific and engineering libraries and visualisation tools, and wide range of development tools.

You will write up analyses and do coding exercises using the popular Jupyter Notebooks platform, which allows you to see immediately the result of running your code and helps you identify – and fix – any errors more easily.

You will look at real data from the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and other organisations. You’ll be encouraged to discuss the data and your analyses with your fellow learners, and to build a community of researchers around these and other datasets.

Why Take This Course?

This is a free online course. This MOOC will be offered with Video Transcripts in English.  Applicants can get a verified certificate.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to…

• Demonstrate an understanding of basic programming concepts.
• Develop an awareness of open data sources as a public resource.
• Using a programming environment to develop programs.
• Produce and write simple programs to analyse large bodies of data and produce useful results.

Requirements

The course does not assume prior experience in programming or data analysis. Basic familiarity with a spreadsheet application will be an advantage.

The course does not require any knowledge of statistics, but you need to have basic numeracy skills, like writing arithmetic expressions, using percentages and understanding scientific notation. If you wish to brush up on your numeracy skills, we recommend the FutureLearn course Basic Science: Understanding Numbers from The Open University.

To study this course you will use specialist software. You can use the software online, via a free account on a website, or offline, by downloading and installing a free software package. You will receive instructions about both options via email before the course starts. The online solution requires a good internet connection and has some limitations.

Instructors

Michel Wermelinger

Rob Griffiths

Tony Hirst

How To Join This Course

• Go to the course website link
• Sign Up At FutureLearn
• Select a course and Join
• Once a course has started, applicant will be able to access the course material
• After the start date, students will be able to access the course by following the Go To Course link on My Courses page.
• Applicants can buy, to show that they have completed a FutureLearn course.
• On some FutureLearn courses, learners will be able to pay to take an exam to qualify for a Statement of Attainment. (These are university-branded, printed certificates that provide proof of learning on the course topic(s)).

Apply Now