The RCT Source

The Open University offers free, self guided online course covering research, data, and evidence. 

Please check with your manager to attend as there are time committments.

This course is free -No Need to sign up

20 Hours Self guided study

Exploring data: graphs and numerical summaries, will introduce you to a number of ways of representing data graphically and of summarising data numerically.

You will learn the uses for pie charts, bar charts, histograms and scatterplots. 

You will also be introduced to various ways of summarising data and methods for assessing location and dispersion.

The course covers: 

1. Introducing data

2. Data and questions

3. Pie Charts amd bar charts

4. Histograms and scatterplots

5. Numerical Summaries

6. Conclusion

Sign up for THIS FREE COURSE 

10 Hours self guided study

Organisations need change in order to respond to new challenges, making the change is not staightforward.

This course explores how to use data to inform a change you would like to make within your business or organisational context.

It looks at the type of evidence you can gather to inform your proposed change, and how to evaluate data with a view to using it as part of this transformation.

Specifically, you will learn about internal and external sources of secondary information and how to evaluate them. You will also examine how to negotiate access to different types of information in a work context. 

Finally, you will obtain hands on experience in collecting and using secondary sources of information in the context of researching and making this organisational change.

Even though the course looks from a becoming a practitioner- researcher, there is still a lot of areas to learn from that are applicaable in the council.

The course will cover:

1. Refining your opportunity for change

2. Developing questions

3. What is secondary data?

4. External secondary data

5. The advantages and limitations of secondary data

6. Evaluating internal and external secondary data

This course is FREE-No need to sign up

7 hours self guided study

Start this course right now without signing-up. 

Infographics are becoming an essential tool in data representation and research communication. 

The power of infographics in research dissemination, you will explore when and how infographics can be useful to your work. 

You will look at some good and bad practice in making and using infographics, and will learn how to evaluate infographics that appear to be presenting research evidence. 

The course concludes by introducing some free resources that can help you produce effective infographics of your own, and critically evaluate the infographics of others.

The course covers:

1. Getting noticed in an age of information overload

2. Visualising data

3. The power of infographics

4. Evaluating infographics