MY PROGRAM
Data Literacy for Data-Driven Decision Making
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Data literacy isthe ability to effectively access, understand, use, and communicate data in both visual and narrative form. This course provides a foundation for practitioners and leaders, from traditional and nontraditional learning environments, whose roles depend on data-centric thinking skills. It focuses on interpreting, evaluating, and communicating data effectively, three skills that support data-driven decision making. It also examines the implications of using data to inform decisions from ethical, cultural, and diversity/inclusion perspectives. Students will work with use cases from their own disciplines/career fields and build their data storytelling skills by employing both narrative and visual methods.
COURSE SYLLABUS
ASSIGNMENTS
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Learner Engagement: Data Plan
COURSE REFLECTION
I think that creating the data plan was helpful because it prompted me to think through the entire data collection, tweaking and presentation process. I am always dealing with spur of the moment, need it in two hours data requests and so I haven’t had much practice with planning out what a thoughtful plan might look like! I just had to write my fiscal year 24 goals and they included creating data collection plans for measuring learner and partner satisfaction. Short term quarter goals include identifying three key performance indicators that can be used in each of these plans. I will then need to review the data I am currently collecting to see if it is still what I need, or if survey questions/data collection methods need to be updated to collect data around my KPIs.
I definitely need more hands-on-practice with collecting, cleaning and presenting data. I often get the impression that I spend a totally unnecessary amount of time on my data pulls, but I don’t have the skills to speed the process up. And once I pull data, I’m not very good at determining the best way to present it. I expect to be working with a co-op student to better integrate the many systems that I currently pull data from and to streamline the collecting and analyzing process. I expect that I’ll continue to learn a lot!
As I enter the last two semesters of my degree program, I realize that while I am frequently pulling what I’ve learned in this program over to my daily work, I haven’t done a good job of highlighting these new skills for my manager. And so, another of my short-term goals is to identify three best practices/skills learned in this program that I can start using in processes at work. Writing these down and sharing them with my manager is step one towards better communication of how I’ve been developing my learning design skills.