With today’s world increasingly revolving around data, skills in data management, analysis, and visualization have become essential and in demand across industries, especially social work. This course empowers students without a math or statistics background to work effectively with data and data management systems. Strong computer competencies are required. The course covers three major areas to help you acquire practical skills for working with data across various settings.
- Data Preparation: Learn the challenges of dealing with messy, real-world data. Hands-on exercises teach you how to clean, organize, and manage data.
- Data Visualization: Discover how to create charts and graphs to bring out key insights and patterns embedded in your data. You will learn to select optimal strategies based on your type of data and your audience’s information needs.
- Data Storytelling: Tie together all the knowledge and skills by learning to design interactive dashboards with engaging data narratives. We'll explore essential design principles concerning layout, color, and typography. The course culminates with a capstone project, where you'll apply and display your new skills by building an interactive dashboard on a topic that interests you. This project will be a valuable addition to your professional portfolio, displaying a diverse set of in-demand skills.
Pathway Elective For
- Management & Leadership
- Policy & Political Social Work
- Program Evaluation and Applied Research (Host)
Objectives
- Acquire techniques to clean, manage, and prepare messy, real-world data, making it suitable for analysis and visualization.
- Develop skills for analyzing and summarizing data to extract insights and patterns from data.
- Learn to construct impactful visual displays of data for different types of data and diverse audiences.
- Convert visual displays of data into data stories, effectively conveying key insights by utilizing design principles related to layout, color, and theory.
- Design interactive dashboards, providing a dynamic and engaging platform for users to investigate data.
- Show proficiency in preparing, analyzing, and visualizing data using spreadsheets and major data visualization platforms.
Design
Students will learn some of the major analytic and quantitative tools used by practitioners in assessing or evaluating human service programs or systems, which include a range of specific programs. The theme of this course is how to increase the rationality of the planning, analysis, and evaluation process, particularly of programs intended to serve the underprivileged or oppressed populations. Students will learn that human service organizations include a wide variety of programs of diverse size and complexity, with respect to their activities and goals. This course will impart skills which can be applied at various levels of analysis in different contexts.
Intensive Focus on Privilege, Oppression, Diversity and Social Justice (PODS)
This course integrates PODS content and skills with a special emphasis on the identification of theories, practice and/or policies that promote social justice, illuminate injustices and are consistent with scientific and professional knowledge. Through the use of a variety of instructional methods, this course will support students developing a vision of social justice, learn to recognize and reduce mechanisms that support oppression and injustice, work toward social justice processes, apply intersectionality and intercultural frameworks and strengthen critical consciousness, self-knowledge and self-awareness to facilitate PODS learning.