The Role of Data Literacy within a MOOC Analysis

This paper discusses the role of data literacy in the planning of analysis of data from a six week Smart Cities MOOC delivered on the FutureLearn platform. The aim of the analysis was to discover whether the MOOC had met the aims of engaging participants with topics related to smart cities and to evaluate social interactions and understanding of the key concepts through analysis of MOOC comments. The paper identifies where data literacy impacts on decisions made, such as the need to include both domain and data expertise in the analysis, whether this is provided by a single person or by a team. It also identifies a need for better tools for rapid protoyping of methods for analysing large data sets particularly of non-standard data, such as natural language data. This would be of benefit in cases where the analysis will be used just a few times for a specific purpose, such as analysing the MOOC data across several presentations