Self-Paced Online Courses

Self-enroll in any of these courses with your UTORID. If you don't have one, contact us.

  • Data Visualization - An Introduction (Part 1 – Theory and Critique)

    Through a combination of lecture and activities, this self-paced online course will use a data visualization workflow model to introduce participants to best practices and guidelines for designing effective visualizations and evaluating visualizations. There will then be an activity to apply best practices to critique visualizations. For more information on Data Visualization, including topics covered in the course, and services offered by the libraries, see our Data Visualization Guide

  • Data Visualization - An Introduction (Part 2 – Practice with Tableau)

    Through a combination of lecture and activities, this self-paced online course will introduce participants to a common data visualization tool, Tableau Desktop. Participants will learn to create a variety of visualizations such as a line graph of profits over time by product category, a box plot of iris petal widths by species, and a stacked bar graph of word frequencies in Romeo and Juliet. For more information on Data Visualization, see our Data Visualization Guide

  • Introduction to Infographics

    Through a combination of lecture and activities, this self-paced online course will introduce participants to best practices and guidelines for designing effective infographics and evaluating them. Participants will get a chance to go through the entire design process of an infographic, from determining the story, sketching the layout, choosing appropriate data visualizations, selecting fonts and colours, and finally using a common online infographic creation tool called Piktochart, to implement the design and create a finished infographic. For more information on Data Visualization, including topics covered in the workshop, and services offered by the libraries, see our Data Visualization Guide.

  • R - An Introduction

    This course gives users a thorough introduction to the statistical programming language R in RStudio. It consists of videos, activity and quizzes. The topics covered include data types and data structures, exploring data, graphs, new variables, managing data, tidyverse and R Markdown. This course is suitable for users who are new to R or those who want to review their R skills. For users interested in specific topics, videos can also be watched here.

  • R - Intermediate (NEW)

    This intermediate-level R course gives users a gentle and thorough introduction to reshaping data, the data manipulation package DPLYR, if-statements, for loops, functions, and the popular graphing package GGPLOT2. This course is suitable for users who have used R before. For users interested in specific topics, videos can also be watched here.

  • Working with Messy Data in OpenRefine

    This workshop will provide an introduction to OpenRefine, a powerful open source tool for exploring, cleaning and manipulating “messy” data. Through hands-on activities, using a variety of datasets, participants will learn how to explore and identify patterns in data, normalize data, transform and reshape data, and more. 

Esri Virtual Campus Courses

Students, faculty and staff affiliated with the University of Toronto ArcGIS Online organization have access to Esri Virtual Campus e-learning courses. See this tutorial on how to access online GIS classes.