The data science for open wash data (ds4owd) course is held by the openwashdata team at the Global Health Engineering Group of ETH Zurich
The aim of the course is empower WASH professionals to engage with tools and workflows for open data and code. This course is:
- free
- provides participants with a certificate for successful completion
- using exclusively tools that are free and open source
- offers 1:1 coding support between lectures and beyond the course
You can find all details about this course and how to sign-up for it here
The aim of this website is to measure the impact of ds4owd and present collected data to encourage open data sharing practices.
This presents the overall website activity at a glance.
Total Unique Visitors
5034
Total Page Views
23983
Total Visits
6373
Visit Duration (mins)
3.48
The graph below showcases a time series of daily visits to the website along with the top sources. Direct visits are the most common source of traffic.
| Source | Visits |
|---|---|
| Direct / None | 5447 |
| openwashdata.org | 467 |
| 216 | |
| 129 | |
| GitHub | 104 |
| Gmail | 59 |
| find-it.pro | 24 |
| Yandex | 13 |
| ghe.ethz.ch | 9 |
| 8 |
Our visits come from around the world with a majority from Switzerland, Malawi, and the United States of America.
Course participants joined us from all over the globe! We had the most participants from Nigeria, Malawi, India, and the United States of America.
Participants’ experience ranged from no experience to significant programming expertise, with most participants tending towards the former.
What do they think of the course?
- Most participants completed the course and enjoyed it.
- There were some suggestions to improve the structure of the course.
Completion Rate
80%
Overall Course Rating
3.96 / 4
Instructor Rating
3.88 / 4
Course Structure Rating
3.56 / 4
What did they say about the course?
After the course, we asked participants to tell us how confident they were about applying the skills they gained
Self-rated improvement in R skills
100%
Self-rated improvement in version control
113%
Confidence in Applying Skills
3.04 / 4
As a part of the course, learners were introduced to Posit cloud to encourage open data sharing practices and provide a platform for sharing their work.
The space proved to be extremely useful with over 200 active projects from 138 participants, removing barriers to barriers to usage.
Total Active Users
138
Total Active Projects
225
Total Hours Spent Using the Space
2528
Daily usage spiked through the duration of the course, with up to 160 hours of usage per day. Since the end of the course, we see continued usage and the creation of new projects.
The openwashdata course led to the publication of datasets relating to WASH and SDGs. These datasets cover a wide variety of topics and were provided by course participants as a part of their final project. We publish these datasets in a standard format and provide open access to encourage open data practices. The datasets are published using the washr package developed by the openwashdata team. The full list of datasets can be found here
Published Datasets
28
Dataset maintainers
8
Number of unique locations covered
14
Our data comes from various sources and presents varying levels of difficulty characterised by initial “tidyness” of data. To learn more about tidy data visit: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/tidy-data.html. While this is a small sample, academically published data is easier to locate.
Our datasets cover several topics, they’re primarily related to WASH.