Be an Effective Communicator using Data

Presenting data to senior decision-makers, management boards, and stakeholders is typically a daunting task, as it requires both expertise in handling large amount of information as well as highly developed communication skills to summarise and show effectively key analytical results. This short course trains you in becoming an effective communicator by making use of data to summarise, present or reinforce results and conclusions arising from the data at hand. The course does not require any prior expertise, as it will cover the ground up from basic principles in organising and displaying information as well as examples of effective communication in a variety of settings. The course covers key techniques used in producing various types of graphs to summarise information and display basic relationships between variables of interest. The course is highly applied and relevant work examples are used.

1. Basic data handling. This module outlines introductory skills in data including data type, acquiring/sourcing/finding data fit for a purpose, fundamentals of data organisation in graphs and tables, and foundational statistics. The goal of this module is to introduce participants to essential data literacy concepts, be able to find relevant data or suitable alternatives, read data using basic descriptive statistics (mean, range, median, mode, etc.) and present the data in a way conducive to storytelling using basic summary statistics, table and figures/charts.
2. From data to story and from story to data. This module focuses on preparing, or ‘cleaning’, data for analysis, and introduces fundamental strategies for identifying and visualising relevant data. Learners will filter, group, and aggregate data, describe relevant data for the purpose of analysis, apply descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation) to tables and charts (bar, line, histogram, scatter plot) to improve the key message to be communicated. Both approaches of developing a story from data, and using data to communicate effectively the content of a story are reviewed.
3. Advanced data analysis. This module focuses on data analysis including key statistical tests, correlation and linear regression and t-tests, to visualise correlational and causal data relationships.  Please note that we will cover the intuition behind those techniques and highlight when and why one may use them. This course does not require any prior knowledge of maths or stats.
4. Communicate effectively with data. This module focuses on using a variety of techniques to visualise data to generate and communicate insights for decision-making. It will also present examples of effective narrative using data analysis.