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Education

Inspiring training in behavioural data science

Members of the Centre combine their first-hand research experience to provide practical and inspiring training in behavioural data science. Over the years, we have worked with a wide variety of audiences, including academics, professionals, and students. We tailor the educational experience to all our audiences. For example, we have designed a ground-breaking system which fits the data science training to the needs and requirements of postgraduate students at UCL.

Principles

Our teaching is guided by a number of tried-and-tested principles, including:

  • Transparency and openness: We make our teaching materials openly accessible and focus on the use of open source and publicly available software such as R and python.
  • Interactive: All our training is centered on direct interaction, whether via questions, polls, tests, or, supervised assignments. Knowing what you know, and what you don't know, is the most efficient path to further knowledge.
  • True to life: We illustrate techniques with real data sets with relevance to the audience. Using real data ensures students are ready for real applications, where data is often messy. Relevance of the data topic increases motivation to "dive deep" into the data.

We provide a variety of one and multi-day workshops to researchers, academics, and professionals.  Members of the Centre also convene the core undergraduate and postgraduate statistics modules at the UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences (PaLS). At the undergraduate level, the curriculum has been designed to provide a coherent curriculum in data science and statistical analysis with R. At the postgraduate level, we have developed a ground-breaking three-tiered system, so that data science and statistics training can be tailored to the interests and needs of individual students within postgraduate programmes. We work together as a team and continually monitor and evaluate the education we provide.

Open education

In support of our training, we have developed a number of openly available textbooks. Examples are:

Tutorials

Members of the Centre have written a number of tutorials on behavioural data science techniques, published in the academic literature. Some examples are: