Welcome to the course

We have developed this course in response to the demand for courses aimed at anyone who wishes to explore a new subject area, improve their digital skills to support their existing role, or to open up opportunities to adopt a new career path.

This course is supported by the Institute of Coding (IoC) through funding from the Office for Students (OfS). The IoC provides flexible courses that fit around learners’ everyday lives and daily commitments, enabling learners (employed or not) to upskill and meet the future needs of our digital economy. Our aim is to provide open taster courses for you to gain knowledge in a range of subjects in computer science to help increase your digital skills for the future.

This is the first week in Applied Data Science, where we introduce the basic skills, principles, and approaches in data science, including programming, data cleaning and preparation, modelling, and visualisation.

Through this week’s activities you will:

• Learn to manipulate data in preparation for analysis
• Plot and interpret visualised data
• Manipulate basic Python code to change the look of a visualisation
• Explore the use of multidimensional data using the example of geo location
• Find patterns in data using clustering and classification techniques

Meet the team

Your lead educators for this course are professor of computer science, Mark Levene, Felix Reidl, lecturer in data science, and Stelios Sotiriadis, lecturer in cloud computing and data science at Birkbeck, University London. Your assistant lecturer throughout this program is Martyn Harris, also at Birkbeck, University London.

You can follow them and see all the comments they make, including course updates and feedback, via the links to their FutureLearn profile pages.

Checking your progress

When you reach the end of a step and have understood everything, select the ‘Mark as complete’ button. This will update your progress page, and will help you to keep track of which steps you’ve done. Any steps you’ve completed will turn blue on your to-do list.

You can check your progress page by selecting the icon at the top of the step, where you’ll see what percentage of the course steps you’ve completed. These steps will turn blue on your to-do list.

Your task

Please introduce yourself and share with other learners in the comments what interests you in data science and why you have decided to do this course.