Some examples of our work
A Data Clinic: Wrangling for Watchdogs
A data clinic is a workshop where participants bring troublesome data and a School of Data crack team troubleshoot and advise how to work with it. Here’s what the participants had to say about our first one.
Wrangling For Watchdogs – A Workshop with School of Data from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.
Video by Sam Muirhead
Testimonial
“The Open Knowledge Foundation’s School of Data is a leader in the strengthening of global ‘data literacy’ around the world, with a substantial corpus of practical, digestible, free tutorials. The School of Data is ahead of the curve both as an enabler of broad public ‘data literacy’, and in embracing the reality that 100% of the value of opened data is in its use and reuse. In short, I’m a fan.” — Craig Hammer, The World Bank
Looking for data skills training? Look no further.
Besides the free material offered online and events run internationally, the School of Data team and partners offer bespoke or tailored courses for your organisation.
School of Data works to empower civil society organisations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively, through both online and in-person “learning through doing” workshops.
Please contact us for details on any of the these courses, or if you’d be interested in discussing a custom program tailored to your needs.
Show me your course list Talk to me about custom training Jump to examples of our work
About our training
Custom workshops
Data Expeditions
Data Expeditions are data driven investigations with a focus on learning through doing – on a variety of topics.
Data clinics
Bring your problem datasets and get help to turn them into meaningful information that works for you.
Topic specific workshops
Don’t see the topic you need listed below? Contact us and we will put together a syllabus for your training requirements.
What we do
We develop custom events and workshops to suit your requirements. We also develop course materials for courses they wish to run in house.
Courses range from one day to one month residential courses.
Course prerequisites
None – we’ll start from the ground up.
“The School of Data Expedition model is an excellent wrap-up activity for participants to work as a team to employ all the skills and tools they have learned over the week. Even more importantly, it reinforces the need for collaboration to complete the expedition within a few hours and encourages teams to persevere despite the hurdles the come along with a data investigation including scarcity of data, difficulty in establishing relationships among datasets and producing digestible stories for a general audience.” Eva Constantaras, Internews Kenya. Read more about the Internews Expedition.
Standard Courses
Data Skills 101
Data Skills 101 is an introduction to the basics of running a data project. Suitable for absolute beginners – this course takes participants through key stages in the lifecycle of a data project, teaching them to avoid common pitfalls and get a solid overview of staple tools that can help with their work.
Course length
3 days.
What is covered
- Introduction: What is Data?
- Finding and getting data, an introduction
- Basic introduction to cleaning data
- Basic analysis using spreadsheets
- An introduction to basic visualisation tools
- Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Course prerequisites
None – we’ll start from the ground up.
Introduction to Data Extraction
Is your data trapped in paper documents, PDFs or on the web without a download button? These formats make data hard to use to immediately for analysis and research but manual extraction via transcription or copy-paste can take too long. The data extraction course teaches the basics of how to use tools and methods to quickly convert data from non-useful “closed” formats into user-friendly “open” ones, so that you can get on with your work.
Course length
5 days
What is covered
- Introduction to extracting data from scanned documents and PDFs
- Introduction to web scraping (collecting data from webpages using code)
Course prerequisites
Basic knowledge of spreadsheets and familiarity with HTML is an asset. Not up to speed on HTML? There are plenty of great resources on the web to change that.
Introduction to Budget Visualisation
Have budget or spending data that you would like to visualise for display on the web?
Course length
3 days
What is covered
- An introduction to working with transactional data
- Preparing data for visualisation
- Categorising data
- Introduction to desktop and web-based visualisation tools
Course prerequisites
Basic knowledge of spreadsheets. No programming skills required.
Contact us for details Back to the Top
##Contact
Don’t see something that you are looking for? Please contact us and we will be happy to discuss custom options with you. We can also offer standard courses based around course material from the School of Data course list.
Places we’ve worked
Here’s a few of our travels:
Africa
- Ghana and Tanzania – Trainers at Data Bootcamps – World Bank
- Kenya – Data skills training for Budget Analysis – International Budget Partnership and Development Initiatives .
- Nigeria – Training on Budget Visualisation – BudgIT
Asia
- India – Key Data Skills Workshop – the Fifth Elephant, Bangalore
Europe
- Bosnia – Budget Visualisation and Analysis Workshop – Centre for Public Interest Advocacy
- Germany – Training on Crowdsourcing – Transparency International
- Italy – School of Data Journalism, Perugia (with European Journalism Centre) – International Journalism Festival
- London – Exploring Extractive Industries Data Expedition – Department For International Development and Revenue Watch
Latin America
- Trainers at Data Bootcamp Bolivia, Venezuela – World Bank