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Syllabus

IDST 125L: Data Literacy Lab

Spring 2024

About This Course

The Data Literacy Lab is required for all incoming first-year students and is attached to the Triple-I course The Art and Science of Expertise. The lab’s aim is to teach students the basics of working with data: how to acquire it, store it, analyze it, visualize it, and disseminate and interpret information about it, and how to do all of this in a responsible and ethical way. We will discuss the methods and tools that researchers use to accomplish all of these steps in working with data so that students are prepared to join academic fields centered on empirical research and to critically evaluate the results of empirical research that are presented to them. In addition, students will receive practical, hands-on experience in working with data, with a particular focus on three pieces of software: Microsoft Excel, Tableau, and R/RStudio. After taking this course, students will be able to: articulate the ethical issues involved in working with data; perform basic data preparation operations; analyze data by generating statistics and visualizations in Excel, Tableau, and R; disseminate information based on data analysis in both textual and visual formats; and interpret and evaluate data-driven information presented to them by others.

The course is conducted entirely online and asynchronously, and will be administered through Canvas (canvas.unc.edu). The majority of course material will be delivered via instructional videos hosted by Panopto (panopto.unc.edu) and accessible via the course Canvas site.

There is no required textbook for this course. At times, online articles will be assigned as either required or optional reading. Links to these articles can be found on the course Canvas site.

Grading

Each student’s grade in this course will be based on several types of graded assignments: video viewing, exercises, and the final project. The work in this course is structured to be easily completed during the week in which it is assigned (with the exception of the final project). In this course, a week is considered to run from Wednesday at midnight (12:00 a.m.), when weekly course content is posted, to the following Tuesday night (11:59 p.m.), when assignments are due. A small number of exceptions to this schedule are noted under Course Schedule below.

A breakdown of the grading for this course is as follows.

Video Viewing: 10% of total grade

While this course is online and asynchronous, it follows a weekly schedule. Each week, students are responsible for viewing the course video content. It will be posted to Canvas on Wednesday at midnight (12:00 a.m.), and students will have until the following Tuesday night (11:59 p.m.) to view it for credit. Specific deadlines are posted on each weekly video viewing assignment. Failure to watch the course video content by the deadline will result in receiving half credit for video viewing for the week. Failure to watch the course video content at all during the semester will result in no credit for video viewing for the week.

All video views are recorded by Panopto, UNC’s video hosting service, and sent to the instructional team for processing. Credit for video viewing does not automatically show up in Canvas immediately after viewing. Students are responsible for ensuring that their Panopto viewing has been properly recorded. Instructions on how to do so are available on Canvas. The instructional team is unable to disregard the Panopto viewing logs when assigning credit for video viewing assignments.

Exercises: 70% of total grade

During most weeks of the semester, students are responsible for completing an exercise assignment on Canvas. Each exercise will provide instructions on a task or set of tasks that the student must complete (and any materials required to do so) and ask students to share reflections on their performance. Grading of exercises in this course is attempt-based. Students need not complete a task perfectly in order to earn credit for it. It is most important to submit documentation (usually in the form of screenshots) showing that an earnest attempt was made.

The exercise for a given week will be posted to Canvas on Wednesday at midnight (12:00 a.m.), and students will have until the following Tuesday night (11:59 p.m.) to submit it for full credit. Specific deadlines are posted on each weekly exercise assignment. Failure to submit an exercise by the deadline will result in a penalty of 10% per day late being deducted from its score.

Instructions on how to download and install all course software will be made available on Canvas well before any assignment deadlines. Students are responsible for ensuring that any software necessary to complete an exercise is functioning on their com-puter before that exercise’s deadline. The instructional team is available to assist with troubleshooting software issues during during the day on weekdays, but is unable to grant software-related deadline extensions. All software necessary for this course is available on computers at Davis Library.

Final Project: 20% of total grade

The final project brings together all of the content covered in this course. It is completed in small groups, with each group selecting a dataset of interest from a provided list and then working together to (1) formulate a research question that the data can address, (2) prepare the data for analysis, (3) perform summary statistics over the data (if necessary), (4) generate one or more visualizations of the data, (5) create statements about the data, and (6) present the results of the performed analysis in a guided writeup on Canvas.

Every group member need not work on every task required to complete the final project. Rather, students should determine how to divide the workload in a way that takes advantage of each group member’s strengths in working with data. Along with the writeup, students will also fill out a peer/self review, evaluating their own and their team members’ contributions to the final project. Instructions and a grading rubric for the final project will be made available on the course’s Canvas site.

The final project for this course is due on Wednesday, May 1. Late submissions will not receive credit.

The grading scale for this course is as follows:

93.0–100.0 = A

90.0–92.9 = A−

87.0–89.9 = B+

83.0–86.9 = B

80.0–82.9 = B−

77.0–79.9 = C+

73.0–76.9 = C

70.0–72.9 = C−

67.0–69.9 = D+

60.0–66.9 = D

0.0–59.9 = F

All students are expected to follow the guidelines of the UNC Honor Code. In particular, students are expected to refrain from ‘lying, cheating, or stealing’ in the academic context. Submissions of work that are determined to have violated the Honor Code will receive no credit and may result in disciplinary action. Consult https://studentconduct.unc.edu for more information.

Accommodations

Academic accommodations (including but not limited to deadline extensions) are available to students in a variety of circumstances.

Accessibility Resources and Service (ARS). ARS is responsible for assisting students with disabilities, including learning disabilities. They will contact all of the instructors and TAs of a student’s courses regarding the types of accommodation(s) the student is entitled to, without disclosing the specific nature of their condition. It is important to have ARS contact us as early as possible, as accommodation plans are not intended to be applied retroactively.

If you qualify for accommodations through ARS, please take advantage of them. If you are not sure whether you qualify, contact ARS (https://ars.unc.edu) for more information.

University Approved Absence. University approved absences are granted for a variety of reasons, and in this course can be used to push back individual video viewing and exercise assignment deadlines.

The University Approved Absence Office (UAAO; uaao.unc.edu) has information about what qualifies a student for an approved absence, and will contact a student’s instructors if an approved absence is granted. Common reasons for this office to grant approved absences include injury and serious illness.

For those students experiencing personal hardship, approved absences may be granted by the Dean of Students Office (hrefhttps://dos.unc.edudos.unc.edu). Common reasons for this office to grant approved absences include loss of a loved one, long-term illness or injury, experience of a traumatic event, and mental health challenges.

In some limited cases, we may be able to push back assignment deadlines if we receive documentation of a condition preventing a student from meeting a deadline. Types of documentation we may accept include doctor’s notes and evidence of a visit to a health care provider (including mental health).