The medium is the message… Learning to Code for Data Analysis

Tony Hirst and Michel Wermelinger

The Open University FutureLearn course Learn to Code for Data Analysis teaches learners with no prior programming or data analysis experience how to use the Python programming language and the Jupyter notebook programming enivironment to analyse real-world open data from organisations including the World Bank and the UN.
At the end of the course, we used the skills and tools introduced in the course in house to see how far we could get analysing the FutureLearn course data, an approach which has since been extended to incorporate additional techniques, resulting in a self contained, interactive, repeatable literate analysis script.
This talk will describe the notebook environment, its deployment and use both within the course and post hoc to analyse the course data.