Online Learning and Making the Most of Open Government Data

"At the end of October, the Knight Center’s first massive open online course (MOOC), Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization, will be available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Unlike other Knight Foundation courses, Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization does not feature any application or selection process, and students are only charged a small $20 fee if they choose to receive a certificate upon completing the program. Taught by Alberto Cairo of the University of Miami, the six week course will use video lectures, tutorials, readings, exercises, quizzes and discussion forums to teach students how to design attractive, informative and accurate infographics and visualizations. Perhaps the course’s greatest selling point is its practically non-existent barrier to entry—no previous experience is required and Cairo claims that not only is proficiency with any particular software not required, most exercises can be completed using pen and paper...  Many, including U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, argue that the release of government data is not just a 'good government' initiative, but rather, providing government data for private use is a means of spurring innovation and stimulating the economy through new products and services... If private innovation can keep pace with public data dispersal, Tim O’Reilly’s vision of government as a platform may take hold. O’Reilly, like Park, believes that it’s not government’s responsibility to find innovative ways of using OGD; government’s responsibility ends at providing useful, machine-readable data. As long as government maintains its end of the OGD bargain, the private sector can utilize government’s unmatched capacity for data collection to create new value. At the same time, the need for more people capable of analyzing big business data is well documented.  Increasing the pool of experts with data analysis and visualization skills can also help serve the public good by presenting incredibly complex, chaotic datasets in digestible forms, opening them to public scrutiny. Two projects created by Open Spending, an Open Knowledge Foundation initiative, Where Does My Money Go?—a visualization of where tax dollars are directed—and the Uganda Aid Visualization demonstrate how the successful use of OGD by those outside of government can serve to educate citizens who lack an advanced understanding of data and statistics while increasing government transparency... Perhaps the most promising example of online education in this space has not yet launched. The School of Data, a free joint venture from the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU, has the mission to 'promote data literacy and data ‘wrangling’ skills—the ability to find, clean, retrieve, manipulate, analyse, interpret and represent different types of data—across the world...'  Two of the most prominent names in free online education, Coursera and Udacity, offer courses somewhat similar to the Knight Center’s offering, but in both cases data visualization is only part of a broader focus... Two other respected names in higher education, MIT and Harvard, also offer data visualization materials free online. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides free course materials for its How to Process, Analyze and Visualize Data ...  imilarly, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences offers a class in data visualization. Like OCW, Harvard provides free learning materials—a syllabus, homework assignments and student projects—as well as video of lectures from the 2011 iteration of the course..."