Developing your Data Skills

Data is everywhere and is more complex than ever, so it’s important that our staff and students have the tools, skills and confidence to work efficiently with data – whether understanding it, analysing it or presenting it to colleagues.

The Developing Your Data Skills programme is framed around the Jisc Building digital capability framework, where data skills are included in the Information, Data and Media Literacies competence.

The programme offers three capability pathways (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) to make it suitable for a variety of staff and students irrespective of their prior level of knowledge. For each pathway, content is divided into three topics:

• Introduction to Data Skills and Programming
• Statistics and Data Analysis
• Presenting Your Data

The Beginner level will provide a basic introduction to data science, statistics, data visualisation, and programming in Excel and R, Python or SQL.

The Intermediate level is for those already comfortable with statistics and basic use of Excel, building on this to teach data science, analysis, and visualisation using Excel and VBA.

The Advanced level expands upon data analysis skills with optional pathways specialising in Excel, R, Python, or SQL.

This course will be delivered online. After an initial orientation webinar participants will work through the course materials at their own pace culminating in a final data project.