Learning to Speak Data

Spreading the gospel of data literacy across the enterprise

This short (~10-minute) eLearning course was designed for a large financial-services company to help employees—in particular, employees not accustomed to discussing and applying data—improve their data literacy by applying the Value-Information-Analysis (VIA) model. The result was deployed in the corporate LMS for enterprise-wide availability.

Background

The ability to understand and work with data is quickly becoming an essential skill for the 21^st century labor force. Unfortunately, when it comes to data literacy, most people don’t think of the data they already know and the methods they already use. Rather, most people focus on the data and methods they don’t understand.

Implementation Details

I based my course design on the premise that just about everyone works with data in some manner. I started with the quote by Yuval Noah Harari to establish the growing importance of knowing how to understand and apply data, before explaining the concept of data literacy. From there, I established the VIA model as a tool for working with data, applying analysis to information to derive insights and extract value. I then illustrated how data literacy is contextual by illustrating how information and analysis can vary between data domains. I finished the course with a quiz to allow students to assess how well they understood the course content.

To produce the course, I used Articulate Storyline 360 to provide an interactive experience. Storyline 360 provided the capability to add hotspots—n particular to the slide for the VIA model—and a graded assessment at the end. The text-to-speech functionality provided an acceptable narrative voice without the need for dedicated recording space, since I lacked access to a recording facility as a fully- remote worker. I then uploaded the completed course—including a job aid to help learners think about, engage with, and apply data—to the LMS (Workday) and configured the Workday course to use the quiz results to determine if the student completed the course.