Our team selected as winners of the NUS Data Literacy Programme

In April 2020, NUS launched the Data Literacy Programme (DLP) as part of a University-wide initiative to enhance staff capabilities. 

To date, about 600 Executive and Administrative staff have completed the DLP along with a group project as part of the course. Each group project team typically comprised six staff from the same department, who worked on a research question with variables within a data set. Leveraging data concepts and visualisation skills acquired from the course, team members collaborated to analyse data and identify patterns, trends and relationships, and presented the findings to their course instructors.

DLP instructors were subsequently invited to nominate the best projects in their classes, and these shortlisted projects were reviewed and ranked by Professor Carol Hargreaves, Director at the Data Analytics Consulting Centre, and Dr Vik Gopal from NUS Statistics and Applied Probability.

Among 100 projects presented, the three top projects were selected based on their relevance to NUS, how accurately the DLP techniques were applied, and their potential for more in-depth analysis, with the view of moving towards a data-driven, decision-making culture for enhancing operational efficiency.

My project with five other colleagues from the NUS Office of University Communications delved into media consumption patterns and reader demographics for NUS News articles, during the COVID-19 ‘circuit breaker’ period in Singapore. We discovered that although there was no significant increase in readership over this period, there was a spike in the number of international readers, due to the COVID-related news stories. We also saw there was a significant change in our audience’s preferred devices. During the circuit breaker, our readers significantly switched to browsing our content on mobile devices.

With these insights we can create a data-driven content strategy. We can deep dive into the impact of content-type based on local and international readership, and could also curate our content more towards mobile devices as our audience prefers.

Click here to read more about the DLP or watch the video below.