Top data journalism courses available to apply for

Data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics. Hans Rosling's spectacular talks on visualizing world poverty with Gapminder, for example, have attracted millions of views across the world. Data can be the source of data journalism, or it can be the tool with which the story is told or it can be both. The following are

Visualization for Data Journalism at Coursera

Instructor: Margaret Ng

The purpose of this class is to learn how to think about the visual presentation of data, how and why it works, and how to do it the right way. The students will learn how to make graphs like The New York Times, Vox, Pew, and FiveThirtyEight. In the end, they can share–embed their beautiful charts in publications, blog posts, and websites. This course assumes that the students understand basic coding skills, preferably Python. However, the course also provides a brief review on Python in Module 1, in case the students want to refresh their memories on the basics and perform simple data analysis. The certificate will be given by the University of Illinois.

Apply here.

Python for Data Visualization at LinkedIn

Instructor: Michael Galarnyk

In this course from the experts at Madecraft, you can learn how to build accurate, engaging, and easy-to-generate charts and graphs using Python. Explore the pandas and Matplotlib libraries, and then discover how to load and clean data sets and create simple and advanced plots, including heatmaps, histograms, and subplots. Instructor Michael Galarnyk provides all the instruction you need to create professional data visualizations through programming. This course was created by Minecraft.

Apply here.

Data Journalism at Google

This course will help you unlock the powerful world of data journalism to tell deep, insightful stories. You'll learn to find, analyze, interpret and visualize data in compelling new ways. The tools used for this course are Google Sheets, Dataset Search Quickstart Guide, Google Data GIF Maker, Telegrams, Flourish, Google Public Data Explorer, Google Trends, Global Forest Watch, Election Database, and Google Permissions.

Apply here.

MS in Data Journalism at Columbia University

The M.S. in Data Journalism is a three-semester program that provides the hands-on training needed to tell deeply reported data-driven stories in the public interest. Data Journalism students begin their program in the fall taking foundational computational and data courses as well as courses on the fundamentals of reporting. In the second semester, they continue honing their journalistic skills with Writing with Data and the Data, Computation, Innovation workshop, where they will explore cutting-edge storytelling using data and computation, and take a 15‐week seminar and production course with the Master of Science students. In the final semester, students work on the Master's Project, a substantive piece of data-driven journalism. They also join the Master of Science students in taking a suite of courses called Journalism Essentials, which covers the business, historical, legal, and ethical issues of the field. They also take Storytelling with Data and Data, Computation, Innovation II.

Apply here.

Data Journalism Course at Huston University

This free online MOOC covers five modules on data-driven journalism taught by five leading journalists, editors, and journalism professors. The course covers how to begin incorporating data journalism into newsroom culture as well as how to find and clean data, uncovering stories in big data sets, and using visualizations for storytelling.

Apply here.