Upgrade your Google Search skills in an upcoming free online course!

Looking for something interesting and useful to do during the long holiday? Power Searching with Google, a free online course by Google, opens September 24. In this course you'll learn tips and tricks for finding what you're looking for using Google Search.

The course is two weeks long, with three 50-min classes per week. You can take the classes according to your own schedule during the two-week window. An official certificate is provided upon completion.

This course can be useful to teachers, librarians, school and college students and to anyone who uses Google to find answers to simple questions or conduct deeper research.

This is the second offering of the course. According to the Google Blog, the first offering in July was quite successful:

During the course’s first run in July, people told us how they not only liked learning about new features and more efficient ways to use Google, but they also enjoyed sharing tips and learning from one another through the forums and Hangouts

Register to join!

How does all this techie stuff work? Free online course

A new free online course is being offered next month by a Princeton professor using Coursera. The course name is a bit mysterious: Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes. So what is it about? Here are the 20 questions that the course is intended to answer -- this list is actually the course syllabus:

Data Journalism: good, free resources

Free for download and sharing

A recent advance in global journalism is "Data Journalism", which focuses on telling a story in a more compelling way, basing it on numbers and presenting the data effectively.

The new, free and online book Data Journalism Handbook provides a starting point and reference for journalists who want to base their stories on data and present them in a compelling way. The book was assembled by many journalists from top news agencies around the world, including BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times and Deutsche Welle.
The handbook defines and illustrates data journalism in difference ways, including: "Data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics."

Another interesting introduction to Data Journalism can be found in the series of free videos Journalism in the Age of Data: A Video Report on Data Visualization (also available in non-Flash and Podcast versions).

Online course "Forecasting" opens Mar 30

Forecasting is an important tool for planning. How many tourists are expected next season? What is the expected electric power demand in Thimphu tomorrow? How many new students will enroll next year in different schools in Thimphu? How to forecast monthly demand for different medications at the hospitals and BHUs? And how certain are you of these estimates?

Textbook for online course "Forecasting"

Learn about popular forecasting methods and how to implement them in practice through a hands-on online course. I'll be instructing a 4-week Forecasting course on statistics.com. This is a practical course that introduces forecasting methods, performance evaluation, and much more. The course is of interest to researchers and practitioners in education, environmental sciences, agriculture, tourism and more.

Pre-requisite: a university-level unit/module in statistics.

The course is offered online and offers special low rates for Bhutanese (no need for credit card and you receive the course eBook for free). For further details and registration contact me at galit@rigsum-it.com.

Free Web education: now more practical in Bhutan

The world of online learning has been quickly evolving. Four recent advances are now making online learning very attractive in Bhutan. First, more and more high-quality courses are now offered for free. This takes away the credit card barrier, which is still a challenge in Bhutan. Second, new online learning approaches and advances in technology now require less bandwidth to attend a course (no heavy or long videos). Third, many courses are asynchronous (you choose when to be online), so time difference is not an issue. Finally, new course structures have active learning components, such as self-assessment activities.

Online course "Interactive Data Visualization" (Opens next Friday)

I'll be instructing an online course on Interactive Data Visualization, starting Oct 28.

This course is about the interactive exploration of data, and how it is achieved using state-of-the-art data visualization software. Participants will learn to explore a range of different data types and structures. They will learn about various interactive techniques for manipulating and examining the data and producing effective visualizations.

This is very practical and hands-on course. We use real data and discuss practical issues.

This is also a great opportunity to interact with professionals worldwide (through an online discussion board) and to take advantage of online learning for expanding your knowledge. The course is completely asynchronous -- not need to be online at a certain time.

Who can benefit from this course? managers, journalists, researchers and others who handle and present data. Feel free to email me for more information and for the special terms for Drukpas.

Online course: "Forecasting" (opens this Friday)

I'll be instructing an online course on Forecasting, starting Sept 9. Course participants will learn how to build statistical models for forecasting time series, how to evaluate predictive performance, and more.

The course is very practical and hands-on. We use real data and discuss practical issues. It is intended for those with basic statistics knowledge (such as regression models).

This is also a great opportunity to interact with professionals worldwide (through a discussion board) and to take advantage of online learning for expanding your knowledge. The course is completely asynchronous -- not need to be online at a certain time.

Feel free to email me for more information and for the special terms for Drukpas.

Upcoming online course: Interactive Data Visualization

Interpreting data is first done with our eyes. If you deal with data in your job, you may want to expand your knowledge to state-of-the-art techniques and tools for visualizing your data.

I will be instructing the online course Interactive Data Visualization, starting this Friday, April 29. The 4-week course is fully asynchronous, so there is no specific time that you must be online. Each week includes materials to view online and offline (including videos, online resources, and more), and a hands-on assignment that you can complete at your own pace and receive feedback. Participants can post questions and have discussions with the instructor on an online discussion board. The course will require around 10 hours per week. You can find more details here.

The course was designed and is taught by myself (Professor of Statistics and Data Mining) and Dr. Catherine Plaisant (expert in human-computer interaction and user interface design) from the University of Maryland.

This is a great opportunity to interact with other participants world-wide and to experience the potential of online learning. You can also obtain a "certificate of course completion".

Feel free to email me for more information and for the special terms for Drukpas.

Tashi Delek,
Prof Galit

Graphic depiction of the shrinking size of Napoleon's army (width of strip) as it progressed into Moscow and back. From http://www.edwardtufte.com

Upcoming online course: Acceptance Sampling (opens Apr 15)

I will be instructing an online course that can be useful to those working in organizations who receive or send goods to/from multiple sources (the hospital, large shops, Bhutan Agro, UNDP, printers, Yogurt production plant, traditional medicine, BioBhutan, and more).

About the Course:

Online course: "Forecasting"

For all those who've been asking me about statistics courses in Thimphu:
I'll be instructing an online course on Forecasting, starting March 25. Course participants will learn how to build statistical models for forecasting time series, how to evaluate predictive performance, and more.

The course is very practical and hands-on. We use real data and discuss practical issues. It is intended for those with basic statistics knowledge (such as regression models).

This is a great opportunity to interact with other professionals worldwide (through a discussion board) and to take advantage of online learning for expanding your knowledge.

Feel free to email me for more information and for the special terms for Drukpas.