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Learn to code for data analysis
Learn to code for data analysis

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

Introduction and guidance

Welcome to this badged open course, Learn to code for data analysis.

The free course lasts eight weeks, with approximately three hours of study each week. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.

This course will teach you how to write your own computer programs, one line of code at a time. You'll learn how to access open data, clean and analyse it, and produce visualisations. You will also learn how to write up and share your analyses, privately or publicly.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

  • understand basic programming and data analysis concepts
  • recognise open data sources as a public resource
  • use a programming environment to develop programs
  • write simple programs to analyse large bodies of data and produce useful results.

Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every page of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.