DataCamp continues to be an online, hands-on, practical training resource, that faculty can take advantage of to learn how to use the open source statistical environment of R, as well as how to code in Python and forge beautiful data visualizations, among other topics. The folks with DataCamp continue to add new courses and training material to their panoply of offerings, recently adding content on Tableau to their existing courses on R, Python, SQL, Git, Shell, Spreadsheets, Theory of Data Visualizations, and Scala for a current total of over 314 courses available! They have roughly eleven career tracks, and forty skill tracks, taught by 274 instructors. Topic areas include Data Engineering, Programming, Importing and Cleaning Data, Data Manipulation, Data Visualization, Probability & Statistics, Machine Learning, Applied Finance, Reporting, Case Studies, Management and others, like Analyzing US Census Data in R, Single-Cell RNA-Seq Workflows in R and Differential Expression Analysis in R with limma, or an introduction to the essential bioconductor packages using datasets from virus, fungus, humans and plants!
Many of their basic and introductory courses are available for free to anyone via a browser!
ITS has worked with the folks at DataCamp to offer the full range of their offerings through licensed “seats” for our Faculty, particularly those who are considering teaching or research with R in order to move away from expensive data analysis technologies like SPSS. Even without that motivation, R and the packages around it, now offer one of the most comprehensive and full featured data analysis and data visualization tool sets currently available, so it can only help a researcher to learn these tools.
Faculty or staff interested in access to DataCamp though the College’s license should contact Academic Technologist Doug Willen (willen@swarthmore.edu, x-7787). Students are not supported by this license, but faculty can request a class license if you would like your students to have access to this training during the semester your class is offered. Students can certainly take advantage of the free elements of training through DataCamp, but would need to purchase their own licenses for training beyond those basics, if they are not enrolled in a class supporting an educational license.