Image CC-By-SA J Brew on Flickr
Your Mission: Tell Stories with Data
Learn how to tinker with, refine and tell a story with data in this 4-week course. Each week you’ll be commissioned to work with others on a project that will hone your data-wrangling skills. Lessons will be pulled from Open Knowledge Foundation and Tactical Tech with help from Peer 2 Peer University. At the end of the course, you will have finessed, wrangled, cleaned and visualized a data set and shared it with the world.
What to Expect
The course will run April 15 to May 3, and each week your team will receive weekly “Missions” from Mission Control over email. You’ll work together on those projects, including a 30-minute Google Hangout each week. Each “Mission” will lead up to your final project. For each skill you master in the course, you can earn a Badge to show your mastery and to get feedback to further your talents.
The Topic
The topic of this first mission is Carbon Emissions. Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about them at the moment, you don’t need to be a topic expert and the data skills you will learn will be very transferrable to other areas!
The Level
This mission will cater for beginners to spreadsheets and working with data. If you’re more advanced, you are also welcome to join us to hone your skills, and the only limit on what you can learn is your imagination – so if you’re prepared to push yourselves on the project front the data-skills-bucket is your oyster!
About the Mechanical MOOC
A massive open online course (MOOC), and an experiment in how people can learn online.
Rather than trying to create a platform that structures the end-to-end learning experience, as recent MOOCs have done, we’re taking the best OKFN and Tactical Tech have to offer, and open content from the web, and joining them with a robot sherpa to coordinate learner activity and engagement and make sure you make it to the end.
Instead of a professor or university organizing the class, our e-mail scheduler and your small groups will do so–that’s why it’s called “mechanical”.