Software and data make the world go round. Learn programming, to analyse and visualise open data, with this free course, Learn to code for data analysis.

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.

You'll code in Python, a widely used programming language across all disciplines.

You will write up analyses and do coding exercises using the popular Jupyter Notebooks platform, which allows you to see immediately the result of running your code and helps you identify – and fix – any errors more easily.

You will also look at real data from the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and other organisations.

Enrolling on the course will give you the opportunity to earn an Open University digital badge. Badges are not accredited by The Open University but they're a great way to demonstrate your interest in the subject and commitment to your career, and to provide of continuing professional development.

Once you're signed in, you can manage your digital badges online from My OpenLearn. In addition you can download and print your OpenLearn Statement of Participation – which also displays your Open University badge.

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 . Once you complete the course we would also value your feedback and suggestions for future improvement, in our optional end-of-course survey . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

Anyone wishing to provide evidence of their enrolment on this course is able to do so by sharing their Activity Record on their OpenLearn Profile, which is available before completion of the course and earning of the Statement of Participation.

Course learning outcomes

After studying 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.