Data doesn’t lie, right? Actually, data tells a story – as long as you know how to ask the right questions. In this free course, you’ll learn how to engage with data in a systematic and strategic way. You’ll gain the confidence to tell a data story and fact check data-based claims.

About this course

This is a free, self-paced online course.

Data pervades almost every aspect of modern day life, but there are lots of ways in which this data can be abused. Our biases and preconceptions can lead us to make poor assumptions about the world - and, there is no such thing as raw data - it needs to be cooked with care.

Data tells many stories - as long as you can learn to listen to it and to ask the right questions of your data.

This course will take you on a journey through a data set. You explore how correct your hidden assumptions are about a real dataset and start to think about how that data might have been collected. You will explore the data, thinking about what types of variables it has and how they are related to one another. Keep your mind open and your curiosity high!

You will need to think about what the patterns you uncover mean, whether they point to a real effect or are just a mistake and how they might be correlated with other patterns in your data.

Finally, you will look at how data is used (and abused!) as evidence when people use it to tell stories.

This course is based on teaching and research drawn from the Master of Data Science and Innovation.

Course structure

Investigate how data can help to correct your biases and preconceptions
Examine how the process of collecting data might affect the story it tells
Learn some questions you could ask of a dataset to unpack its story
Think about how people can abuse data to tell a biased story about the world.

Learning outcomes

Ask the right questions about data and find out what stories you can tell.
Engage with data systematically and strategically and learn how to tell a data story.
Understand how to explore data and tell your own story for maximum impact.

Who is this course for?

This course is well suited to professionals wanting to learn about how to use data strategically to tell compelling stories.

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Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Bidiagal people and the Gamaygal people, upon whose ancestral lands our university stands. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.

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Journey Through Data

Data doesn’t lie, right? Actually, data tells a story – as long as you know how to ask the right questions. In this free course, you’ll learn how to engage with data in a systematic and strategic way. You’ll gain the confidence to tell a data story and fact check data-based claims.

About this course

Course structure

Learning outcomes

Who is this course for?

Related Courses

Living Well with Palliative Care

The Mind Behind the Money - an Introduction to Behavioural Economics

Modern Slavery in the Home

Human Rights and Emerging Technologies: Research and Capacity Building

Human Rights and Emerging Technologies: an Interdisciplinary Approach

Statistical Thinking

Acknowledgement of Country

START DATE	Start anytime
MODE	Online
DURATION	2 hrs