Hope IT offers an Introduction to Data Analysis course. It’s a compelling topic, as working with data is a red hot subject matter in the IT industry right now.
This course featured Goggle’s Looker Studio, that allows one to create dashboards, on-line, and for free. It’s a pretty good tool to start learning, and can connect to many data sources, including Google Sheets. We offered this course on-line 3 times (January 2024, Feb. 2022, and Feb. 2021), and had 5 students combined in these 3 courses. Check out the embedded dashboard at the end of this page, that we end up with at the end of the course.
We were able to begin to see how data begins to tell a story. Placing data in grids begins to show this, and even more so when using charts. We covered creating our own cell phone data from members in the course, and then reviewed datasets from Kaggle, like the Video Game Sales and COVID Positive cases in the US. We reviewed how to review the data, just by looking at minimums, maximums, counts, sums, and even mean (average) and median.
And there was plenty to talk about and explore. In fact, we explained how to avoid “dirty tricks” with statistics, referencing the book How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrel Huff. One can control the sampling of your data, and draw wrong conclusions. One can trick others to think change is occurring more drastically, if one fails to start at zero in charts. We also covered 4 curious datasets (Anscombe’s Quartet) that all have nearly the mean (averages) and other statistical function values, but once you graph them, you see they are indeed different: conclusion, you need to review data from multiple ways, and one way is to review their charts. Lastly, we also discussed how Data Science is used to make future predictions, using models and other statistical techniques.
Our lesson plan for the course is below:
Hope IT – Data Analysis Lesson Plan
We also created a write-up for instructors.
Hope IT – Looker Studio – Instructor’s Notes
Below is one example of how to embed the Looker Studio dashboard in a website. Try it… you can hover your mouse over the maps to see details. That was fun to do to connect our WordPress course with our Data Analysis course.